Director of the Conservatory Program at The Rivers School
Matt Heck, the director of the Conservatory Program at The Rivers School, is a musicologist, writer, violinist, DJ, drummer, voiceover artist, singer, and actor. After attending Oberlin College, where he earned a BA in music, he went on to graduate studies in musicology at Brandeis University and completed a PhD. His dissertation connected theoretical explorations of Dmitri Shostakovich’s harmonic-contrapuntal language with musicological studies that emphasize the composer’s ambivalent and ironic modes of expression and situates Shostakovich’s aesthetic in the history of Russian ideas. He has studied in St. Petersburg with the help of an American Councils Study Abroad Scholarship and a Title VIII Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State. With a Mellon Dissertation Research Grant, he explored Shostakovich’s datebooks at the composer’s family archive in Moscow. As a writer, he has written scripts for “Tanglewood: Then & Now” segments on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “BSO Now” site, and published pieces for the BSO program book, among other projects. As a violinist, he plays with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. As a DJ, he has held multiple residencies at clubs in and around Boston, and taught a class entitled “Love is the Message: Dance Musics and Their Cultures from Disco to Dubstep,” which received a University Prize Instructorship award at Brandeis. As a voiceover artist, he has recorded voiceovers for the BSO’s “Tanglewood: Then & Now” segments, recorded pre-concert announcements for the BSO at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood, and performed as the narrator in the world premiere of Paths of Parables by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. He also performed in Porgy and Bess at Tanglewood and Symphony Hall with the BSO under Bramwell Tovey.