Victoria Fischer, professor of music, was featured in an article in the November 2003 edition of Alamance Magazine. The magazine is sold at locations throughout Alamance County.
The article, written by Elon senior Sarah Umberger, is reprinted below with the magazine’s permission:
Victoria Fischer
Striking The Right Key
By Sarah Umberger
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “music is the universal language of mankind.” No matter where we go, we encounter music – the songs on the radio, the music and commercials on television, even the rings on our cell phones. Because of musicians like Victoria Fischer, love for music in all forms is passed from generation to generation.
Victoria has been on the music faculty at Elon University for 14 years, teaching courses in piano, music history, fine arts, and liberal studies. She has also traveled with students to Belize, England and Italy. Some 18 hours a week, she instructs students on the black and white keys as well as trains students to teach piano to others.
Throughout the years, Victoria has been a part of the changes at Elon, collaborating with fellow Elon professors Thomas Arcaro, Jeffrey Pugh and Anthony Weston to create the pilot freshman Global Studies course for the 1992-1993 academic year. The Global Studies course is designed to teach first- year students to examine global contexts through faculty and student interaction and collaborative learning.
“I like to learn,” she told me as we sat in her office in the Fine Arts building, surrounded by musical scores and texts. Victoria began taking piano lessons at age 5. The highlight of her study of the piano was the two years she spent at the Vienna Conservatory through a Rotary Club Fellowship.
“Besides the piano study, I went to concerts and operas every night. It was such an important part of the experience – hearing the masterworks performed by great performers. It all contributes to the whole musician that you become,” she said. During her time at the Vienna Conservatory, Victoria also made time to travel, building her trips around the great art galleries.
During her undergraduate study, Victoria participated in a tour of the great cathedrals of Britain with a group of organ students from Centenary College of Louisiana. By serving on juries for piano competitions and performing, she has traveled all over Sicily five times. Victoria also helped to design the Belize Winter Term trip at Elon and remains a strong supporter of the study abroad program.
“I believe in study abroad – it changed my life,” she says. “The continuing experiences I’ve had for travel and study abroad since my own undergrad days are a profound part of the person, teacher, performer, family member, friend, you name it, that I am today. As I’ve experienced other places and people and cultures, I get a stronger sense of my own identity, of my place in the world and the responsibility that education and privilege carries with it, the responsibility to be open-minded, compassionate, curious, generous. And I realize that you don’t have to visit exotic ends of the world, as exciting and rewarding as that is, to enjoy the diversity of humanness.”
Victoria was born in Texas and she grew up in Louisiana, but life kept turning her back to North Carolina. “I was destined to come here,” she says. At 14, she spent a summer at Brevard’s music camp. That summer, she decided music was what she was supposed to do with her life. “I was with my tribe,” she recalled.
That summer at Brevard was not the last time Victoria would come to North Carolina. Her aunt and uncle had a home in Balsam, where she would frequently visit for vacations. After completing her doctorate work at the University of Texas at Austin, Victoria was offered a position on the roster of the North Carolina Visiting Artists program in Hendersonville and Raleigh. She turned down both locations to take a sabbatical replacement position at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, but she soon returned to North Carolina to teach at Elon College. The final marker that solidified her place in North Carolina was her marriage last summer to native Stephen Faw. Smiling, Victoria said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Victoria earned her doctorate and two masters’ degrees and she has spent the subsequent years researching the music of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. She recently completed a recording of Bartók’s music, “Evening in the Country,” as a project of the Elon Enterprise Academy. Much of her research of Bartók’s music concerns the folk influences that can be found in the music. Through her research, Victoria has gotten to know many Bartók scholars around the world, has traveled to the Bartók Archive in Budapest and has published her research in a variety of books and journals. “I call my work the scholarship of performing,” she says. “What do I need to perform?” Lately, she has been focusing on reconnecting original texts to Bartók’s music.
Beyond her research and teaching, Victoria also maintains membership in the North Carolina Music Teachers Association, where she is the Piano Section Chair, and is currently serving as President of the Elon chapter of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.
She recently received the Southeast Region Artist Award, receiving a monetary award, an active-for-life membership in Phi Kappa Phi and a framed certificate. Winners of the award were chosen based on the quality of their accomplishments in their field of arts, achievements of a national or international scope and the number and nature of honors and other forms of recognition for artistic work. As a recipient of the regional award, Victoria has been nominated to the national level.
Dr. David Bragg, chair of the Music Department at Elon, said “All of the members of the music department are very happy for [Victoria]. We are very proud of her and appreciate the work she has done for the Music Department and for Elon University.”
“My new favorite hobby is gardening,” Victoria says. Especially enjoying the “soul satisfaction of digging in the dirt,” she is learning the tricks of the trade. As with anything else, she believes the key to mastering a new hobby or task is through reading and learning. “What would we do without learning?” she asked me. “Everything that you learn contributes to who you are; it adds to the whole horizon that you have.”
“Life is so rich; there’s never enough time to learn all you want to,” Victoria says. As we travel through our daily lives, take time to stop and enjoy the art that surrounds us, for there is always something new to learn.
(Sarah Umberger is a senior at Elon University, majoring in English.)