Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
Cross-cultural interactions — one musical, the other migratory — lie
at the heart of the year-long study-abroad adventures on which two Lawrence
seniors are embarking as the college’s latest recipients of the Thomas
J. Watson Fellowship.
Benjamin Klein, a music performance (tuba) and theory/composition major from
Sheboygan, and Kelly Scheer, a biology major from Lisbon, Iowa, were two
of the 50 recipients of $22,000 fellowships announced in March by the Providence,
R.I.-based Watson Foundation. The fellowship supports a wanderjahr, a year
of independent travel and exploration outside the United States on a topic
of the student’s choosing.
Klein and Scheer were selected from 184 nominees representing 50 of the nation’s
top liberal arts colleges and universities. They are the 63rd and 64th Lawrence
students awarded Watson Fellowships since the program’s inception
in 1969.
Music across cultures
Denied his request as a fifth-grader to take up the drums (on the parental
logic that they were “too loud”), Benjamin Klein instead turned
his musical interests to the tuba. Two years later, he secretly purchased
a manuscript book and began composing music.
Today, as equal parts performer and composer, Klein wants to expand his non-traditional
perception of what music is — a view that emphasizes interaction in
any environment between the artists themselves or the artists and their audience.
To that end, he will use his fellowship for trips to Amsterdam, Sydney, and
Hong Kong to explore making innovative music by crossing cultural boundaries.
“These three cities are alight with new ideas,” Klein says. “Since
the 1960s, Amsterdam has become a center for new music. The importance of
music in the cultural life of Sydney is recognized throughout the world in
the sail-like shells of its famous opera house, but it is little known that
popular musicians are producing new and creative works for an innovative
music theatre scene there. And, in Hong Kong, there is the collision of Western
and non-Western, democratic and communist cultures, a dichotomy that has
exploded
into one of the world’s biggest and most dynamic
metropolises.”
Klein plans to stir music’s melting pot by contacting numerous acclaimed
tuba players and composers in the three locales, as well as by establishing
relationships with young and emerging musicians and artists through important
international music festivals held in or near each city.
As a tuba player, Klein has performed with the Lawrence University Symphony
Orchestra, the jazz and wind ensembles, and the Improvisation Group of Lawrence
University (IGLU). His work as a composer has been recognized with the Pi
Kappa Lambda Composition Award and the James Ming Scholarship in Composition.
Traveling down the flyway
Kelly Scheer’s Watson Fellowship will take her to the Far East for
a year, where she will conduct a scientific study of one of the world’s
longest and most important migratory bird routes, the Australasian Flyway.
Covering 20 countries and stretching from Russia’s Siberia to New Zealand’s
South Island, the flyway annually provides navigational guideposts for more
than 50 species and an estimated five million individual migratory shorebirds.
During her year abroad, Scheer, like her study subjects, will travel the
length of the 15,000-mile flyway. Along the way, she will visit the Olango
Island Wildlife Sanctuary in the Philippines; Moreton Bay near Brisbane in
Australia; the sanctuaries of Firth of Thames and Firewell Spit along the
coasts of New Zealand’s North and South Islands, respectively; and
the western coast of South Korea along the Yellow Sea. She will end her journey
with a three-month stay at the Moroshechnoye Estuary on the Kamchatka Peninsula
in Russia. At each stop, she will study not just the shorebirds themselves
but the habitat conservation efforts made in those countries as well.
“In each of these countries, I want to design fieldwork and observational
studies to investigate the various shorebird species and their migratory
behavior,” says Scheer, who spent the Winter and Spring Terms of 2005
in Costa Rica on the Associated Colleges of the Midwest’s Tropical
Field Research program and undertook independent research on bat activity
in Door County last summer [Lawrence
Today, Fall 2004].
“Migratory birds are so incredibly in tune with their environment in ways
that humans can not comprehend,” Scheer says. “They are truly
global citizens, ignoring the artificial borders governments have delineated.
I have always wondered what it must be like for a migratory bird, and my
Watson project will provide me with the closest glimpse possible.