Like many a Swarthmore student, Lili Tobias \u201919 finds herself graduating this year with a somewhat different degree than her younger self had anticipated. \u00a0She came to Swarthmore planning to major in linguistics, but soon, as she describes it, \u201cmusic took over my life. And so now I\u2019m a music major and linguistics minor.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Tobias, though, that academic transition was less a tortured decision than natural progression, something that \u201cjust happened.\u201d \u00a0A pianist in high school, at Swarthmore she began taking classes in theory, composition, and musicology, and joined the Swarthmore College Chorus and the Garnet Singers. \u00a0Eventually she realized that most of her classes were related to music, and that those were the ones she really cared about. \u201cThe department really felt like home to me,\u201d she says of choosing to focus on music. \u00a0\u201cI knew all the professors, I knew all the other majors\u2026 it just felt like that\u2019s where I belonged.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sense of community is what Tobias names as the best part of her experience in Swarthmore\u2019s music program, which although it may be small\u2014there are only two majors in her year\u2014is plenty mighty. \u00a0She sees its size as a defining positive attribute, saying that \u201cit\u2019s so welcoming and we\u2019re very close knit. The best friends I\u2019ve made here\u201d tend to be \u201cconnected to the music department in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The small size also affords a lot of personalized academic attention and opportunities. \u00a0Tobias has taken a composition course, the only repeatable course in the department, every semester since sophomore spring. \u00a0After one\u2019s first time taking it, the class functions like an independent study, so, she explains, \u201cit\u2019s very individualized.\u201d \u00a0She gets tailored listening assignments from Professor Gerald Levinson, a well-recognized contemporary classical composer, that he thinks will relate to the direction of Tobias\u2019s own work. \u00a0She\u2019s also had the opportunity to compose several pieces for the college Chorus and Garnet Singers, with the encouragement of its director Joseph Gregorio.<\/p>\n
Tobias says she tends to listen to and compose mostly classical music, and especially admires \u201cwomen composers of the past and of the present. \u00a0I identify with them because there\u2019s just a lot fewer women that go into composition.\u201d She\u2019s currently writing her senior comprehensive paper on Amy Beach, a composer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. \u00a0Beach was an American musical prodigy who started composing as soon as she learned to play the piano as a young child, and, although she\u2019s rarely part of modern classical repertory, earned in her own lifetime unusual acceptance and success in an overwhelmingly male field. \u00a0For her senior comprehensive, Tobias will not only analyze Beach\u2019s work from a theoretical and musicological perspective, but also perform on piano three of her songs, with soprano Rebecca Regan \u201919.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s unsure as of yet as her exact plans post-graduation, although she says that \u201cgoing into music publishing is something that\u2019s definitely appealing to me.\u201d \u00a0Tobias got a taste of the business as an intern this past summer with Schott Music, a publishing company in her home city of New York. She describes herself as someone who likes editing and creating a pretty and polished final project, and \u201creally enjoyed\u201d combining those skills with her love of music.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, whatever specific path she may take, Tobias feels certain that music \u201cis going to be the main focus of my life somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n
Lydia Roe ’20<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like many a Swarthmore student, Lili Tobias \u201919 finds herself graduating this year with a somewhat different degree than her younger self had anticipated. \u00a0She came to Swarthmore planning to major in linguistics, but soon, as she describes it, \u201cmusic took over my life. And so now I\u2019m a music major and linguistics minor.\u201d For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":7518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,63],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7519,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7517\/revisions\/7519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}