It had been several years since Kelsey Rogers had taken a piano lesson. Yes, she had found time to play the instrument with some regularity. But she knew that her technique and execution weren’t quite at her peak from years ago. With a major performance looming, Kelsey reached out to her longtime piano teacher, former CCMS faculty member Gregg Pauley, to help sharpen her skills and dial in her interpretation of the selected pieces. And before she knew it, there she was on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston, in front of hundreds of people, ready to showcase the craft she honed all those years ago at Concord Community Music School.
As far as Kelsey was concerned, music has always been just as important as school. She started piano lessons with Pauley at the Music School as a grade schooler, then added violin to her repertoire. She reveled in the familiar cadence of finishing her school day, doing homework in various Music School nooks while she waited for her lessons, and playing her instruments in solo and ensemble settings. It instilled in her a deep love of music, something that she knew from an early age would be a lasting presence in her life. “Even though I didn’t see myself becoming a professional musician, I had a strong desire to keep music as part of my career path,” she says.
Throughout school, Kelsey gravitated towards the STEM disciplines. As she approached the end of her high school years, she was determined to find a way to combine her strengths in subjects like physics and math with her passion for music. She was excited to discover the field of acoustics but frustrated to find that very few American colleges offered courses in the discipline, especially at the undergraduate level. Kelsey decided to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at Princeton University, hoping it would give her fundamentals in physics, engineering, and math that she could combine with music by the end of her collegiate career. The curriculum proved to be more rigorous than she had anticipated and there were moments where she questioned if she had made the right choice. “I wasn’t one of those students who got excited about robotics or building things in the machine shop or other things people in my major naturally gravitate towards.”
After unsuccessfully attempting to find an internship in acoustics during her first two years at Princeton, Kelsey was able to secure an internship at the audio giant Bose as a junior and senior. Even after graduating with her undergraduate degree in 2014, she still needed additional education to pursue a career in the field. Kelsey took the advice of a Princeton alum and pursued a master’s degree in architectural acoustics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Upon graduation in 2015, she was offered a consulting position at the Boston-based acoustics firm Acentech.
Kelsey’s favorite projects throughout her consulting career to date have been opportunities to design and create educational performing arts centers. From her time at CCMS, she knows first-hand the importance of these spaces and regularly reflected on her music school days while designing performance spaces at the Peddie School, Middlesex School, Phillps Exeter Academy, and beyond. “The best day on any of these (years-long) projects is the ‘acoustical checkout’ right before the building is turned over to the owner,” she notes. “We bring all our acoustical measurement gear to the building – all sorts of microphones, loudspeakers, computers, etc., but most importantly, our instruments and our ears. It’s the ultimate combination of STEM and art.”
As a result of her own experience trying to get into acoustics as an undergrad, Kelsey began teaching architectural acoustics classes at Tufts University after a few years at Acentech. With an aim to help grow the program, Kelsey takes great pride in exposing students to the world of acoustics, especially when those students begin career paths in the field. “There are so many kids who have played instruments growing up or who like music and are interested in it in some way, and it can feel like a completely separate universe from the engineering and the STEM classes that they’re taking. I wanted to be a part of trying to show students all of the interesting intersections that they could find between those fields.”
Kelsey’s newest project is a summer program called “Engineering of Music,” which debuts this July. The program exposes high school students to the intersection of art and engineering… and exposes the world to the unique program that Tufts offers.
Kelsey was also the natural choice to feature on piano when the annual Acoustical Society of America conference came to Boston and attendees were treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of Symphony Hall. With abundant classical piano chops and expertise in the acoustics realm, she jumped at the opportunity to fill the air with music as her colleagues marveled at one of the world’s finest performance spaces. It was one of many culminations of her profound love of music, a mind for STEM, and a strong desire to marry the two.
“Growing up, CCMS was as important to me as school was and so music needed to be as important as all of the STEM work,” she says. “That need to weave music into my profession would not have existed without my time at CCMS.”
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