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.