Editor's Note: Christopher McMullen-Laird '05 conducts excerpts from Mozart operas on Saturday, April 2 at 7 p.m. in Rollins Chapel. Open to the public without charge.
Christopher Quentin McMullen-Laird's '05 campus email nickname is "Operageek," and he's not kidding. Wrapping up his senior fellowship project, which focuses on the last year of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life, he says he fell in love with vocal performance at age eleven while living in Switzerland. "I sang in twenty-two performances of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. It was magical," he recalls.
McMullen-Laird is having an unconventional senior year. Instead of taking classes, he is one of a small group of Senior Fellows, students who want to study a particular area in-depth and who have demonstrated to the faculty committee on senior fellowships that their work passes scholarly muster. Rigorous, competitive, and far-reaching, projects involve several disciplines, combining them in unique ways. Fellows work closely with a faculty advisor in planning and executing the yearlong programs.
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McMullen-Laird's program, "1791: Death of a Genius. W.A. Mozart's Last Year," combines applied performance with interdisciplinary research, spanning the fields of history, conducting, and German studies. Through a series of lectures and concerts, he hopes to shed new light on what contributed to Mozart's extraordinary output at the end of his life.
"In his last year, Mozart composed stunning music at a historically important time-the French Revolution in 1789, the coronation of Leopold II in 1790. It was a time of tremendous change," says McMullen-Laird. "His last months saw the composition of three of his most famous works: The Magic Flute, La clemenza di Tito, and the Requiem."
"Senior fellowships are massively collaborative," says Associate Professor of Music William Summers, McMullen-Laird's advisor. "They engage large numbers of students, and work in ancillary fields is required. For instance, Christopher wants to conduct Mozart, but he knows how important it is to understand the composer in his time. Why did Prague love him so much? Why was Vienna lukewarm? The project folds in language skills, cultural history, the impact of urban development on the reception of art, to name just a few."
Born in New Orleans, McMullen-Laird lived briefly in Pennsylvania before his family moved overseas, where they lived in Germany and Switzerland. Just before he started high school, the family moved back to the U.S. and settled in Ann Arbor, Mich. In the midst of all the moves, the study and performance of music has been a continuous thread in his life. In Ann Arbor, he took conducting courses at age fourteen. "Conducting is what I wanted to do," he says, "and while I could take courses, no one would let a fourteen-year-old conduct in performance, so I asked my friends to do an opera with me."
McMullen-Laird is still asking his friends to perform operas and other works under his direction. They will sing portions of Mozart's Requiem in its original, unfinished form. He will also lecture in a German class on Goethe's productions of The Magic Flute and present work on Mozart's contextual world to a history class. "I came to Dartmouth because I could do things here as an undergraduate that I couldn't do even at a conservatory of music," he says.
Dartmouth's focus on international study is crucial to the success of Senior Fellows. McMullen-Laird went to London as a sophomore, enrolled in a program at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz that allowed him to transfer his credits, and took courses at the Frankfurt Conservatory. He came back to Hanover during that year to conduct another Senior Fellow's project - Brian Griffeath-Loeb's '04 opera Sicut Erat - and earlier was chorus master for Chris Collier's '03 fellowship on film and music.
"Dartmouth faculty members treat me as a peer. I can't thank Professor Summers enough for insisting the sky's the limit. I could go to Luxembourg next year and found an orchestra if I wanted to because that's the way he's made me think," says McMullen-Laird.
"This program is an embodiment of how the College encourages students to do the very best they can," observes Summers. "Excellence isn't just measured in grades, it's also measured in how realistically you understand your talent and how you commit to using that talent. Because you're embedded in this community, your talent will enrich the experience for everyone. With these students shooting for the moon, they're taking many of us into orbit with them."
Major support for the Senior Fellows program comes from an endowment gift, the Kaminsky Family Fund, given by Gerry Kaminsky '61. The program is also supported by the Paul K. Richter and Evalyn Elizabeth Cook Richter Memorial Funds.
By LAUREL STAVIS
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