Stephanie Burgis Wins Fulbright Grant for 1999-2000 Study in Vienna Story and photo by Michael Chipman
			Stephanie Burgis, senior music history/horn performance student from East Lansing, Mich., studies french horn with David Brockett, assistant professor of horn. Her advisor is Claudia MacDonald, associate professor of musicology. "I think I'm in for a year of intense cultural enrichment," says Stephanie Burgis, a senior music history/horn performance major from East Lansing Michigan, who received a Fulbright grant for teaching and study in Vienna during the 1999-2000 school year. The Fulbright grant allows Burgis to study part-time at the University of Vienna and teach part-time as an English teaching assistant at a Viennese high school. Winning the Fulbright, says Burgis, is a great excuse to return to Vienna. "I spent five months studying in Vienna with the Oberlin Study Abroad in 1998. Vienna is such a beautiful city, brimming with art and culture. On any given night you can attend at least four incredible classical music concerts. While there, I saw an entire Ring cycle and more operas than I've ever seen in my life. I found the music scene in Vienna more vibrant than it is here -- the people accept music and art as a part of their lives, not as museum pieces." Burgis decided to apply for a Fulbright grant in September 1998, and quickly assembled the extensive application for the October 1 deadline. "I wrote a tentative project proposal, which my advisor, Claudia McDonald, reviewed. (The whole thing had to be typed -- I had no idea there were any typewriters at Oberlin, but I found them.) Then I obtained three letters of recommendation, a foreign language recommendation, and met with Ron Di Cenzo, the Fulbright advisor at Oberlin. He forwarded my application to the Fulbright committee, and a few months later they notified me that I had received the award." For her Fulbright project, Burgis will study Viennese music of the Renaissance and the 20th century, which she says are two disparate musical periods with a Viennese connection. "The composers in the second Viennese school, such as Webern and Schoenberg, were very interested in pre-19th century music as a reaction against Romanticism. In fact, Webern was a music history student at the University of Vienna where I'll be studying. He wrote his thesis on Heinrich Isaac, one of the more famous Viennese Renaissance composers." She continues, "Really the reason I chose this subject is that music of the Renaissance and 20th century fascinates me. I will study music history in graduate school when I return from Vienna, so I hope to find a specific area of focus during my year as a Fulbright scholar. I have already narrowed my focus to Renaissance and 20th century opera because if there is one unifying factor in all of my (many) interests, it is the combination of music and theatre." Though already fluent, Burgis will also continue to study German, along with courses in music history during her year at the University of Vienna. "I do not have to write a thesis," she says, "so I can really concentrate on language study and history, and have time to soak in as much of the Viennese culture as possible."
			Back to the Backstage Pass