Time rewards consistency. Through knitting, gardening, cooking, and especially teaching, Anne Werry delights in the passage of years, “I love to watch kids unfold as they grow… it’s the greatest privilege.” 2025 marks Anne’s 25th year on the NCMC faculty, and with about 25 private students in any given year, Anne is responsible for the careful development of dozens of cellists. Though the decades pass, teaching is “endlessly fascinating. People always ask, “don’t you get tired of teaching Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?” but you’re not teaching Twinkle; you’re teaching kids.”

At 8 years old, Anne’s fascination was with the double bass, but, being 8, she had to compromise for a smaller instrument, and the cello stuck! Straight-backed, bright, and elegant, Anne had anticipated a career as a performer, not a teacher, nor a mother. Yet when she migrated to the Boston Conservatory from New Zealand on a Fulbright scholarship in 1992, she faced the unexpected: love. Anne met her future husband, Eric Roth, in her first week in the country, and fell in love with the Suzuki method during a unit on the subject in Andrew Mark’s music pedagogy course at the Conservatory. Her J1 Visa brought her to NCMC for work experience, and those early teaching years inspired Anne’s motherhood. A hop, skip, and a jump later, she’d whisked Eric away to New Zealand to tie the knot, and the couple returned to NCMC expecting a child of their own.

Committed to fostering their kid’s love of music, both parents earned certificates in the Music Together program, and enrolled their son, Nat, in Suzuki piano at the age of 3. Ten years later, after his Bar Mitzvah, Nat took up the bassoon with Rebecca Eldredge, and found the time for various singing groups as well. His sister, Isla, followed in this pattern at a couple years' delay, enrolling in Music Together, Suzuki violin, and then studying the viola with Emily Greene after her Bat Mitzvah. 

Teaching has been Anne’s mainstay through all of this (with the benefit of healthcare through Eric’s office job at UMass Amherst). Wearing New England’s highways as a touring orchestral musician would wear heavily on her family too, so NCMC has provided a stable alternative for this cellist. She speaks excitedly of her garden, her Mountain View Farm CSA, the growth of her students over the years, and the scenic colors of the scarf she dons, which mirror the landscape she knit it in – New Zealand’s Abel Tasman National Park. Between her family, her crafts, her students, and local performances, Anne’s life is a full one and rewarding one. It’s rare to come across full-time musicians who have stayed in one place for as dedicated a number of years as 25. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t question it every year,” Anne confesses, “moving on from teaching, from NCMC… but this is important to me.” Anne is important to NCMC, too, and represents a number of the values that this community holds dear: commitment to early childhood education, musical longevity, kindness, and collaboration.

After all, what good is acclaim or creativity if you’re not effecting good in the world?