The Vernacular Music Center Scholarship

The Vernacular Music Center Scholarship at Texas Tech University provides financial assistance to a student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts who is a practitioner of one or more traditional performance idioms. In return, VMC Scholarship recipients provide coaching, teaching, and community outreach events as advocacy for their respective idioms, while acquiring skills and perspectives which will enable them to become leaders in community arts. Award is made on the basis of competitive application and audition; additional criteria include professionalism, maturity, demonstrable leadership capacities, and institutional need.

Application Process

Consideration for the Vernacular Music Center Scholarship is a two-part process. Each applicant completes a preliminary application which includes a short essay. This preliminary process is followed by a short audition with the members of the VMC Scholarship Committee.

Part I (essay)

In a brief (1-2pp), well-organized narrative essay, provide an effective and persuasive articulation of responses to the following three topics:

(1)    Describe your own prior musical experiences and formal or informal training with this traditional performance idiom. Cite influential teachers and/or significant developmental experiences and explain how those past experiences have shaped your own artistic sensibilities.

(2)    Describe your current priorities as regards your own performance within this traditional idiom and explain how those priorities reflect and further actualize what the idiom itself prioritizes.

(3)    Describe the ways in which you visualize your future goals in learning, teaching, and sharing this idiom after your Texas Tech experience is completed. Link these future goals to both your prior experiences and the idiom’s own social and artistic priorities.

Part II (audition)

Instrumentalists

• Play one unaccompanied dance piece, from memory, with appropriate tempo, rhythm, and interpretation.
  
• Play a second unaccompanied dance piece of a different type, from memory, with appropriate tempo, rhythm, and interpretation.
  
• Play one “listening piece,” from memory, with effective style, phrasing, and interpretation.
  
• Respond in an informed fashion to questions about style, repertoire, and performance considerations.
  

Vocalists

• Sing one unaccompanied solo, at a mid- to fast-tempo, from memory, with appropriate tempo, rhythm, and interpretation.
  
• Sing one unaccompanied solo, at a slow or rubato tempo, from memory, with effective style, phrasing, and interpretation.
  
• Respond in an informed fashion to questions about style, repertoire, and performance considerations
  

Dancers

• Perform one traditional dance piece solo, with appropriate tempo, rhythm, and interpretation (recorded accompaniment may be employed).
  
• Perform a second traditional dance solo of a different type, with appropriate tempo, rhythm, and interpretation (without accompaniment).
  
• Demonstrate one traditional dance technique, describing and explaining technical and interpretative considerations in its proper execution
  
• Respond in an informed fashion to questions about style, repertoire, and performance considerations.
  

For additional information, contact VMC Director Dr Christopher J Smith (christopher.smith@ttu.edu)