By April Mulherin, assistant director of media relations
Photo by Jennifer Eriksen, director of campaign communications
(Spring 2008 issue)

Meghan Dzyak ’08 loves it in The Kitchen—New York City’s internationally acclaimed Kitchen Center for the Arts, that is.

Last year, the music-creative writing major won a Wilson Scholarship to conduct research at The Kitchen for her undergraduate thesis on Rhys Chatham, a composer, performer and founder of The Kitchen’s music program. In January, she returned for a semester-long curatorial internship. Founded as an artist collective in 1971, The Kitchen has helped launch the careers of many artists, including legendary composer Philip Glass.

During the internship Dzyak delved into The Kitchen’s extensive collection of audio and video recordings—a taste of what life will be like when she pursues musicology in graduate school. “A musicologist is somebody who studies the history of music, with analysis of the music itself,” she told the Portland Press Herald in a January article about the internship. At UMF, Dzyak was introduced to musicology through her first-year seminar class—an interdisciplinary study of modern times seen through art, literature, music and politics. She continued to study musicology by traveling abroad, corresponding with contemporary artists and attending music society conferences.

“The constant support and close interaction with professors allowed me to take my education in a direction that I never could have anticipated,” said Dzyak, who twice received the Elsie C. Grote Scholarship. (Started with a bequest from Grote, an art education instructor from 1951 to 1970, the merit-based, full in-state tuition award is available to female students at UMF who have shown proficiency in one of the creative arts.) “I started my education with three goals: to play music, to write and to teach. When I found that there was an interdisciplinary study at UMF that combined these three, I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”