Two Wheaton seniors awarded prestigious Watson Fellowship

NORTON, Mass.--Wheaton seniors Liza Semler and Tyler Matteson are two of 50 college students nationwide selected today to receive a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. The $22,000 award will support a year of travel and research for each student; Matteson plans to study the role of the electronic drum in traditional world music, and Semler will document the struggles of dairy farmers on dying farms.

No stranger to traditional music, Tyler Matteson formed his own Celtic-based band as a teenager in Epsom, N.H., and has since recorded three CDs and has performed widely throughout the Northeast. His performances, coupled with his music studies at Wheaton, inspired a growing interest in the impact of technology on traditional music styles and techniques.

"As I began to research electronic music, I found it had many similarities to the music I was familiar with and discovered that I could use a greater depth of vocabulary to describe what I was hearing," Matteson wrote in his Watson application. "I realized I could explain a Celtic tune in terms of electronic music and deconstruct a trance anthem as though it were a Scottish reel. I strove not only to understand this music that was new to me, but wandered upon a new way of understanding my own music."

Matteson, who was home-schooled through high school, plans to travel in the Domincan Republic, England, Brazil, India, France, Morocco and Sweden to look inside a few traditional music styles that are particularly fertile with change and adaptation to see how musicians are responding to the introduction of the drum machine, and to explore the creative and social tension that exists between the traditionalists and the innovators.

Her hometown of Middlesex, Vt., inspired Liza Semler's interest in the ways communities cope with the loss of rural traditions and values when dairy farms stop operating. An anthropology major with a keen eye for the visual, Semler will study farming in Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada, using her camera to document hidden stories.

"When I was younger, I used to call myself a spy," Semler said. "I absolutely loved to observe people, eavesdrop on their conversations, watch their gestures, expressions, social interactions. I learned that I could tune into the lives of people whom I previously knew little about, to become a participant in part of their lives, let them feel comfortable with my presence and eventually allow them to confide in me. ...The same capacity I developed to understand my community's farming culture from the pavement border is the ability I have used to cross cultural and geographical borders using anthropology as my passport."

Semler is an experienced world traveler; she's worked and studied in Sweden, Belize and South Africa. For her Watson project, she will focus on the rhythms of life for elderly dairy farmers in rural communities, whose farms have ceased to operate for a variety of reasons, using oral histories and documentary photography "to discover the ebb and flow of life for older farmers who were born in an era where dairy farming traditions were a responsibility of inheritance, an influence of rural culture, and a product of community necessity."

In 2005, The Thomas J. Watson Foundation considered nearly 200 candidates nominated by 50 private, liberal arts colleges noted for their quality and commitment to undergraduate education.

"The awards are long-term investments in people likely to lead or innovate," said Beverly Larson, the executive director of the Watson Fellowship Program and a former Watson fellow. "We look for people with passion, a feasible plan, leadership potential and creativity. The recipients get unusual freedom in global experiential learning."

Wheaton's current Watson Fellow, Adar Cohen '04 of Peterborough, N.H., conducted research in Turkey and Peru, where he examined expressions of national, ethnic and religious identity within the cultural history of Oriental rug making.

Other New England colleges with students receiving Watson Fellowships this year include Williams, Bowdoin, Amherst, Colby, College of the Atlantic, Connecticut, Middlebury, Rhode Island School of Design, Wesleyan and Wellesley.