When Professor of Music David Becker gave up a tenured position and turned his back on a 21-year stint as director of orchestras and professor of the graduate orchestral conducting program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to become the conductor of the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, it wasn’t the bright lights of College Avenue that drew him to Appleton. After studying music at Ithaca College and the University of Louisville, he first came to Lawrence early in his career, spending four years in the mid-1970s with the Conservatory of Music as a teacher of viola and director of orchestral studies.
Upon leaving Lawrence, he went on to teach at Oberlin and then the University of Miami, returning to Wisconsin in 1984 to take up the appointment at Madison. When he took a leave of absence in 2005 to teach at Lawrence for the academic year, he didn’t have any set future plans. Before the year was out, however, he knew that he wanted to stay permanently. While declaring that it was his enormous respect for the Conservatory students and faculty and for Lawrence as an institution that ultimately influenced his decision, he is quick to single out his fellow ensemble directors for praise, citing the high energy, creativity, and collaborative spirit that flourishes within the halls of the Conservatory.
"There is a level of collegial cooperation right now at Lawrence that is simply amazing,” he says. That, as Becker points out, is something that is not all that common in higher education and, in the end, proved hard to resist.
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