Cellist Paul Dwyer, a senior cello performance major at the Conservatory, has received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. The award, more than $40,000 a year for up to four years, will cover Dwyer’s tuition and fees and provide a stipend while he pursues a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in cello performance with Professor Richard Aaron at the University of Michigan.
           
Administered by the U.S. Department of Education, Javits Fellowships are awarded to only two music students in the nation each year.

Dwyer, 23, is a student of Assistant Professor of Cello Amir Eldan, where he also has studied baroque cello with Associate Professor of Viola da Gamba and Cello Catharina Meints and cello with former Professor Peter Rejto and former Visiting Professor Hans-Jørgen Jensen.

“Oberlin as a whole has broadened my musical horizon,” says Dwyer. “The presence of the historical performance program has provided me with the opportunity to start playing baroque cello and to play in a baroque orchestra. On the other end of the spectrum, the enthusiasm with which contemporary music is performed and fostered at Oberlin has changed my point of view regarding new music.”

Born in Munster, Indiana, and raised in Vienna, Austria, and Munich, Germany, Dwyer began playing the cello when he was six years old. In 2001, he won second place in the Jugend Musiziert, a German competition for young musicians, and was invited to join the National Youth Orchestra of Germany, with which he toured several European countries, made recordings, and appeared in televised performances conducted by Gerd Albrecht and Günther Schiller.

Since enrolling at the Conservatory, Dwyer has won the Luigi Silva Memorial Award for Best Cello Performance at the 2005 Corpus Christi International Competition for Strings (Texas), second place in the 2005 International Heida Hermanns Competition for Strings, the Cleveland Cello Society’s 2005 Agnew Prize for Best Interpretation of a Bach Suite, and first place in the 2006 Hellam Young Artist Competition. This year, he won the $2,500 second prize and the Audience Choice Award at the Schadt String Competition for Cello, held in March 2007 in Allentown, Pennsylvania; and the top prize at the Tuesday Musical Association’s Scholarship Competition in Akron, Ohio — the $1,400 Arden J. Yockey Scholarship for Strings.

A 2006 recipient of Oberlin’s Ernest Hatch Wilkins Memorial Prize, given in recognition of academic excellence, Dwyer was one of four winners of the Conservatory’s 2006-07 Concerto Competition. Winners of the annual competition receive the honor of performing as soloist with the Oberlin Orchestra or Oberlin Chamber Orchestra. Dwyer performed Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 for Cello and Orchestra in E-flat, Op. 107, with the Oberlin Orchestra under the baton of Bridget-Michaele Reischl, Music Director of the Oberlin Orchestras, in a May 2007 concert dedicated to Oberlin’s retiring president Nancy S. Dye.

After completing his graduate studies, Dwyer plans a career as a performer. “I love performing,” he says. “I can see myself in a wide variety of ensembles, ranging from orchestras to chamber music groups, performing all types of music. Eventually, I might also be interested in teaching.”