The Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer academy for advanced musical training. Every season a new class of TMC fellows gathers on the Tanglewood campus for a transformative experience immersed in performance and learning. Each class is compromised of the absolute finest young musicians selected through a rigorous application and audition process. For many, TMC represents the final milestone before a professional life in music. 

Fellows across the TMC’s six programs (Composition, Conducting, Instrumental, Library, Piano, and Vocal Arts) engage with a summer that emphasizes collaborative performance. This practical method of learning offers fellows a chance to not only draw on the knowledge and experience of the BSO musicians and guest faculty around them but learn from each other while rehearsing and performing together. 

In the same day a violin fellow may experience a Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra (TMCO) rehearsal with BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons, an excerpt class with a member of the BSO, play in a chamber music project alongside a faculty member, and sit on the Koussevitzky Shed lawn among colleagues enjoying a BSO performance. 

This collaboration exists not only within programs but between programs, creating a holistic community of musicians indulging in the release of a creative summer under the backdrop of the Berkshire hills. Vocalists perform with instrumentalists in chamber music and orchestra projects, composers have their works workshopped and performed and conductors lead the TMCO in concert. 

 It would be impossible to list all the distinguished musicians who have studied at the TMC. They include Claudio Abbado, John Adams, Marin Alsop, Leonard Bernstein, Tania Leon, Seiji Ozawa, and Dawn Upshaw, as well as countless orchestral musicians around the world including over 40 players in the BSO. Alumni of the TMC play a vital role in the musical life of the United States and world as performers and composers. The TMC maintains its commitment to the future as one of the world’s most important training grounds for composers, conductors, instrumentalists, and vocalists.