Belmont University student Aaron Moss has been awarded a Fulbright grant to study Musicology in the Czech Republic, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced. Moss is one of approximately 2,000 U.S. grantees that will travel abroad for the 2004-2005 academic year through the Fulbright Program. The program was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, with the intent to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the rest of the world. The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. We asked Moss how he came to be a Fulbright scholar…
Moss: “I started thinking about spending some serious study time in Prague when I went there with Dr. Wylie on Maymester 2000. The city is so beautiful, and so hospitable, and filled with so many different cultures, and right on the edge of a changing political landscape, that it just screamed for someone to be there, watching the cultural influences, especially through music.
“I spent the 2002-2003 school year at the Hochschule fuer Musik in Dresden, which is about a 3-hour train ride from Prague. While there I got in touch with some of the musicians and musicologists in Prague and learned that I could find a great deal of American influence in the composition of Czech classical music after 1989, when the Soviet communist influence ceased.
“Last fall I applied for a Fulbright scholarship under those parameters, with the great help of Dr. Wylie and Dr. John Paine. I was originally scheduled to be an alternate, but the program found some more money that enabled me to go.
“In September I will go to the city and spend a week with my fellow Fulbrighters in the Czech Republic getting oriented. Afterwards I’ll be studying with the people with whom I’ve already made contact. It’s a nine-month grant, from September until June. I plan to use this opportunity to gather materials for my next thesis or dissertation at a graduate school in the United States.”
