Student Profile

I was hoping it would happen, but I was overwhelmed when I found out. It’s a great feeling.”

— Laura Smith ’03

Laura, currently a senior at William and Mary and a member of LCDS’s graduating class of 2003, will use her scholarship to return to Toledo, Spain. There, she will serve as assistant to the director of Mestizarte, an educational program promoting education through the performance of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and flamenco music. As part of her work, Laura plans to study the fusion of flamenco and Maghrebi music (music of western North Africa) resuming the research she began during a study-abroad program three years ago.

The Fulbright Scholarship program was established in 1946 as an exchange program to offer students, scholars and professionals the chance to travel overseas for study, research and teaching.

“I was hoping it would happen,” Laura said, “but I was overwhelmed when I found out. It’s a great feeling.”

Laura explained there are three things driving her current work, one being her love of travel, an affair kindled at LCDS.

“It all started thanks to the M.U.N. trip,” she said of her experience as part of the LCDS delegation that traveled to The Hague in The Netherlands her senior year. In four years at college, she has gone abroad five times and says she will continue to be happy if “I could just keep traveling and living in different countries for the next couple of years.”

Language is the second driving force.

“At some point in the past 10 years or so I’ve studied Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic,” she remarks. “I’m going to try to take French over the summer because the people I’ll be working and playing with in Spain speak Spanish, Arabic and French.

And the third driver, of course, is the music.

The daughter of Peter and Betsy Smith currently plays with WM’s Appalachian Ensemble and sings with the William and Mary Chorus. She also teaches piano, conducts the College Choir at Bruton Parish Church and, for the past four years, has played in WM’s Middle Eastern ensemble (of which she is currently assistant director). Her work there created the spark.

She says she didn’t know much of Middle Eastern music until “I got roped into playing in the Ensemble because I played the hammered dulcimer, which is shaped similarly to the qanan (a Middle Eastern lap zither) but which, as it turns out, is musically very different.”

Yet why travel to Spain to study Middle Eastern music?

For one thing, she says, Maghrebi “is a better term than ‘Middle Eastern’ since most of the rest of the world doesn’t consider north Africa to be in the Middle East. Maghrebi refers to the region encompassing Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

“But it makes sense to look at Maghrebi music in Spain because it is only eight kilometers away from Morocco and historically there’s a huge precedent for Muslim influence in Spain,” Laura explains. “There are also great numbers of immigrants trying to enter Europe through Spain today and Spain is faced with the issue of integrating growing minority groups into mainstream culture.”

The work she will be doing in Spain with her Fulbright will focus on ways in which cross-cultural music can serve as a vehicle to spread tolerance, understanding, and cross-cultural communication.

“I think this is really important,” Laura says, “not only in Spain but everywhere around the world. Can, for example, the same ideas be applied to border music on the Texas/Mexico border?”

With thoughts like that, it’s no surprise Laura says she believes she might like a career (though she cautions her plans in this area change bimonthly) in exploring ways to use music as a means of social activism (“however that is interpreted,” she adds).

Some sort of activity seems to be a constant with Laura. This past fall at her Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony, Laura was selected as the recipient of the Ann Callahan Chappell Award, given to the year’s most outstanding Phi Beta Kappa initiate. She has maintained a 4.0 GPA in her double major of Anthropology and Music.
In her “spare” time, she plays the fretted dulcimer for an Appalachian music band, “Hunt Like a Dog,” which just last year released its first CD.