Indian Hill Music / Groton Hill Music Center
Boston is home to three internationally renowned music schools and each has its own performance space – Berklee College of Music (Berklee Performance Center), New England Conservatory (Jordan Hall) and Boston Conservatory at Berklee (Boston Conservatory Theatre) – but the city has also included some less-known music-education institutes like the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, which held concerts at the Playhouse in the Park in the 1960s and ‘70s. And that tradition continues today at Groton Hill Music Center, which has an enrollment of over 2,000, includes two performance halls and has presented a multigenred assortment of regionally, nationally and internationally acclaimed artists, among them Graham Nash, Bill Frisell, Rosanne Cash, Molly Tuttle, Richard Thompson, Robert Cray and Dar Williams.
The venue’s origins are as humble and suburban as could be. Its story begins in 1985, when a small group of educators and chamber musicians seeking to mix high-quality education with world-class presentation formed the Orchestra of Indian Hill and Indian Hill Music in Groton, a town of some 6,500 at the time that’s part of Central Massachusetts’ 21-town Nashoba Valley. Over the course of the next decade, they performed and taught wherever they could, including at Groton’s Parish House and “in living rooms in Shirley, Groton and Littleton,” as former Indian Hill Executive Director Susan Randazzo told Andrew Bowers of The Eagle-Independent in 2010. The organization received about $72,000 in aid from the State of Massachusetts in its early years, according to Randazzo, but that had dropped to about $14,000 by the early 2000s.
MOVE TO LITTLETON, EXPANSION
In 1996, after being based at Littleton Town Hall for a short time, Indian Hill Music had raised enough cash to buy its first official home at 36 King Street in Littleton, its annual budget having grown from $11,000 in 1985 to a whopping $2.4 million. Conveniently located between New England’s two biggest cities (29 miles from Worcester and 37 miles from Boston), the nonprofit expanded from a farmstand-style outfit into a 21-classroom school with its own concert space, Blackman Hall, named after Indian Hill Music co-founder Camilla Blackman. The Indian Hill Orchestra and various other ensembles played concerts there or at the adjacent Littleton High School Performing Arts Center.
Over the next 25 years, Indian Hill’s enrollment grew to 1,500 students of all ages and abilities and thousands from the region and beyond came to see the Orchestra, other chamber-music ensembles, jazz and the occasional opera. Following its stated mission of providing “music, education and community outreach,” the organization held a number of regular events over the years including a chamber-music series at The Kalliroscope Gallery in Groton, Jazz After Hours at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard and free concerts for senior citizens in Littleton. In 2014, thanks to a substantial gift from an anonymous donor (reportedly between $50 million and $100 million), the school/venue was able to afford a far larger space and bought a 110-acre plot at 122 Old Ayer Road in Groton (34 miles from Worcester and 35 miles from Boston).
MOVE TO GROTON, NOTABLE APPEARANCES
After nearly eight years of planning and construction, Groton Hill Music Center opened in September 2022 to rave reviews citing its significance to the region, its acoustics and its founders’ vision. “Indian Hill Music has boldly undertaken one of the most ambitious cultural projects in New England, departing from Littleton to the North Central Massachusetts town where, in 1985, a handful of local musicians and music enthusiasts incorporated,” wrote Lee Eiseman in The Boston Music Intelligencer, referring to the structure as “a love letter to sound.” Designed by Epstein Joslin Architects, a Cambridge-based firm that also designed Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall and Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, the 126,000-square-foot facility includes a 1,000-seat space called The Concert Hall (outside of which are over 1,000 lawn seats for seasonal shows), the 300-seat Meadow Hall, 35 teaching studios and multiple rehearsal spaces.
To achieve state-of-the-art acoustics, Epstein Joslin collaborated with Chicago-based Threshold Acoustics from the earliest stages of the project, the result being that both halls boast a blend of sonic clarity and warmth. The building itself was designed with a combination of wood, stone, glass and steel so that it would look like an organic element of the property, which was once an apple orchard and a horse farm; 70 of its 110 acres, some of which were once owned by J. Geils, are agriculturally protected in an effort to preserve the community’s roots. In a reminder that we’re in the 21st century, The Concert Hall features a custom-built Meta Organworks Hauptwerk Organ that can replicate any of 15 iconic pipe organs.
More than 2,000 students ranging from beginner to advanced are currently enrolled at the school, according to its official website, and are taught by “over 100 of the area’s most professional educators, each one an artist and mentor with an extensive pedagogical background.” It offers free instrument lessons for students from underserved school districts in the greater region – which includes 79 towns in Central Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire – and, in addition to private lessons and classroom training, features “guest artist experiences” as a major part of its program. The first concert was on January 21, 2023, when Vista Philharmonic Orchestra appeared, conducted by Bruce Hangen, a Boston Conservatory professor who was the guest conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 2002 to 2005.
Though Groton Hill hasn’t hosted nearly as many household names as The Bull Run in nearby Shirley, a doubly impressive number of well-known artists have performed in one or both of its halls. Among those that appeared in 2023 or 2024 were jazz acts Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, The Bad Plus and New Black Eagle Jazz Band; Texas-based jazz-fusion band Snarky Puppy; bluegrass groups The Del McCoury Band and Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway; classical pianist Jeremy Denk; country artists Rosanne Cash, LeAnn Rimes and Sarah Evans; and singer-songwriters Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, Marc Cohen, Amy Helm, Joan Osbourne, Josh Ritter, Dar Williams, Aoife O’Donovan, Haley Heynderickx and Will Daily. The 2025 roster included Graham Nash, Robert Cray, Shawn Colvin, Richard Thompson, Lori McKenna, Ben Folds, Duke Levine, Loudon Wainwright III, Chris Smither, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Canadian alt-country quartet Cowboy Junkies, Celtic violinist Eileen Ivers, Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show, folk trio The Wailin’ Jennys Mark Erelli & His String Quintet and cellist Zlatomir Fung, among others.
Looking back at how a relatively obscure organization like Indian Hill Music became such a significant part of the region’s musical landscape, Groton Hill CEO Lisa Fiorentino said she’s delighted that the facility is no longer a “hidden gem,” as people often called it in previous years. “I liked the ‘gem’ part, but not the ‘hidden’ part,” she told Glen Rifkin of The Arts Fuse in 2022, adding that her top priority is providing “quality of life” to those in the Groton area and beyond through music, music education and community outreach programs.
(by D.S. Monahan)
