Disclaimer: Sarah Firth is a deputy Features editor at the Daily. Firth was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
One of the many ensembles offered by the Department of Music is the Klezmer Ensemble, also known as the Jumbo Knish Factory, directed by Professor Michael McLaughlin. Tufts’ Klezmer Ensemble performs old and new Jewish music, celebrating a musical tradition that began in Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. While the group has been around for more than 20 years, a new group formed as an offshoot of the Klezmer Ensemble this semester.
The Greek Music Ensemble, founded by senior Sarah Firth, is an entirely student-run group that began after Firth decided to channel her passion for Greek music and culture into a new project on campus. Many of the ensemble’s members were part of Klezmer in fall 2024, including senior Joe Carpenter, who plays the clarinet.
Carpenter explained that the Greek Music Ensemble is not much different from a department-run group.
“It’s run pretty similarly,” Carpenter said. “It’s just in Klezmer, we had an excellent director, and we now have an excellent student director.”
The group meets for rehearsals once a week on Wednesdays. Rehearsals are fairly casual, with anywhere from eight to 10 people in attendance each week. The group is led by Firth and senior Peter Glavas, both of whom sing and play instruments, including the bouzouki, a lute-like string instrument that is a staple of Greek music. Other instruments include piano, trumpet, guitar, violin, accordion and percussion.
The ensemble’s rehearsal process is uniquely collaborative for an ensemble, as the full group talks through each piece, bounces ideas off of each other and plays around with the melodies and rhythms until everyone is satisfied with the sound.
Carpenter described the process of rehearsing each piece, which often includes additional variations on the written sheet music.
“We start on the slower side. … We all just play the melody straight through, and then as we get a little more comfortable with it, we’ll speed it up and start trying to do adaptations or we may do specific arrangements in terms of instruments,” Carpenter said. “We also may try and put a unique spin on it — there’s one piece that we’re trying out doing a funk rhythm rather than a traditional rhythm, so we’re branching out.”
The group tackles several pieces in each rehearsal, often starting with easier songs and progressing into more challenging ones. According to Carpenter, some of the trickiest pieces are those with irregular time signatures.
“A lot of Greek music has odd time signatures — 7/8, 5/8, 9/8 and so forth, and so we started avoiding those kinds of pieces,” Carpenter said. “We played one piece that had a 7/8 time signature … and we all really enjoyed that, so we started playing more interesting time signatures.”
The group is comprised of music majors and non-music majors with a vast array of performance experiences at Tufts. They also invited several local Greek musicians to attend rehearsals as guests, including a bouzouki player who sat in on a rehearsal in February to teach and play with the students.
Many members balance the Greek Music Ensemble with a variety of other groups. Carpenter has used his last semester at Tufts to fit more ensembles into his schedule including the Arab Music Ensemble, Tufts Jazz Orchestra and the pit orchestra for Torn Ticket II’s upcoming musical, “Jekyll & Hyde.”
For many of the students involved, joining the new group has been a rewarding experience. Carpenter described what he has taken away from his time in the ensemble over the last few months.
“It’s been really fun for me. Greek music wasn’t really on my radar until we started doing this ensemble,” Carpenter said. “It’s been fun to learn a whole different style. There are a lot of similarities to Klezmer, which I’m excited about, but there are a lot of stylistic differences and of course, cultural differences.”
The group plans to hold their first public performance on May 5 at 5 p.m.
