President Clayton Spencer discusses her vision for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at WRBC. Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College President Clayton Spencer recently sat down with Alfred Russo ’15 and Jordana Gluckow ’16 at WRBC-FM to discuss a range of topics. In a relaxed and wide-ranging conversation, President Spencer answered questions about key initiatives at the college, how she thinks about organizational change, and opportunities for innovation and experimentation provided by Short Term.

Listen to the entire interview on , or to the selection of excerpts that we’ve curated below.

The restructuring myth

This past year, changes to student support services and college programming have some students believing that the college administration is undergoing a large and disruptive restructuring. Not so, says President Spencer.

The Student Experience

Top of mind for some students this spring are the departures of a few well-liked staff and administrators. How do personnel decisions intersect with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ sense of community?

The Campus Culture Working Group

This past fall, Dean of Students Joshua McIntosh convened the Campus Culture Working Group to conduct a comprehensive review of wellness education, monitoring and intervention, late-night weekend programming, standards and accountability, residential programs, inclusiveness, and orientation/first-year programs. How are students involved in this effort?

Purposeful Work

Purposeful Work is one of the distinctive ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ initiatives that are manifesting themselves in myriad ways around campus. How does Purposeful Work fit in with the college’s other needs and priorities?

Improving Short Term

The college has made changes to Short Term by creating Practitioner-Taught Courses and “course redesign” opportunities. What’s that all about?

Does ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ have a parking problem?

A parking study concluded there is plenty of parking at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Meanwhile, one of the WRBC hosts gets introduced to the idea of parking consultants, and a possible new career path.

President Clayton Spencer’s interview on student radio station WRBC-FM on Feb. 10 covered a range of topics: the obligation of a liberal arts college to help graduates get jobs; what responsible investing looks like in 2013; and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ relationship with Lewiston.

And lest those topics seem a tad stuffy for a student radio show called Chin Wags and Grab Bags with DJ Nosebleed and Friends, Spencer rose, or sank, to her host’s level as needed during the 75-minute interview.

Besides big-picture topics, Spencer offered responses to questions about the new ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Bobcat (“not unduly aggressive, but looks like he could handle pretty much anything”); her celebrity crush (Alan Rickman); and why she wanted to get the whole thing over with — so she could get  home to watch Downton Abbey.

“I think she’s actually kinda funny. She’s not a suit,” host Clay Baldo ’13 of Santa Fe, N.M., said to his fellow DJ, Corey Gingras ’13 of Eastford, Conn.

Here’s a brief video of the Feb. 10 event and, below, a selection of edited audio clips from the interview.

Audio clips

Spencer sums up her perspective on what creates a career. “All you need to figure out at any given moment is your ²Ô±ð³æ³ÙÌýgig,” she says. But, “you have to want to do it.”

Despite a long tenure at Harvard, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was not her presidential “safety school.”

What sets ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students apart is their sense of “collective good,” the feeling of “intellectualism with respect that is among the strongest I’ve seen on any campus.” 

To the question of why, in 21st century terms, should someone go to a liberal arts college, Spencer says it’s about creating a valuable and productive sense of self in the world.

The best way to ride the tidal wave of technology is not to “muddle down the middle” but to “go to two different extremes.”

Working hard or hardly working? It’s no joke: The liberal arts education must address careers, Spencer explains.

More than any other, here’s the one quality that Spencer hopes every ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student possesses upon graduation: Authenticity.

Responding to a question from Annie Cravero ’13 of the campus organization ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Energy Action Movement, Spencer explains that responsible investing is about reconciling two important obligations.

The relationship between ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Lewiston is “strong and growing,” Spencer says.

Host Clay Baldo ’13 (center) and fellow DJ Corey Gingras listen to President Clayton Spencer during her WRBC radio interview on Feb. 10, 2013. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

With poet and writing adviser Rob Farnsworth looking on, Karen Nicoletti '12 reads from her novel during the 2012 Mount David Summit. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

As is his custom at the annual senior thesis reading, creative writing adviser Rob Farnsworth blessed the graduating ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ poets and novelists whom he has advised during the academic year.

A poet and senior lecturer in English, Farnsworth invoked the four ingredients that Herman Melville said writers need to continue their important but often thankless art.

“May you go forth into the world,” Farnsworth told the seniors, “and find what every writer needs: time, strength, cash and patience.” And like any good public reader, he paused at “cash” for appropriate humorous effect.

Farnsworth also praised them for their “dedicated commitment to the life of the imagination.”

The seven readers and their voices at the May 17 event (an eighth creative writing major, Emily Cull of Greenville, S.C., was unable to attend):

Alison Cornforth of Warren, Maine, read autobiographical poems. The experience of creating them, she said, raised emotional issues, “but I ended up writing them anyway.”

Listen to Alison Cornforth read her autobiographical poetry.

Alana Folsom of Los Angeles read part of her prose thesis that explains, like a parable, the curse on the small Southern town that is the focus on her story.

Listen to Alana Folsom read prose about the curse on a small town.

Lil Henry of Lee, N.H., read from her poetry on relationships, including one about difficult emotions a young mother feels toward her new baby.

Listen to Lil Henry’s poetry about human relationships.

Karen Nicoletti of Brewster, N.Y., read from her prose thesis about a saxophone player and Juilliard dropout who winds up playing for handouts in the New York City subway.

Listen to Karen Nicoletti read a selection from her prose thesis.

Charlotte Simpson's poetry and prose explore the power of imagination to pull us into the unknown. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Meg Ramey of Bethesda, Md., read her gritty and realistic poem “Violet” and a selection from her prose thesis dealing with mental and emotional disorientation.

Listen to Meg Ramey read her poetry and prose.

Charlotte Simpson of New York, N.Y., read the poem “Opener” and a prose piece called “Space Is the Place,” each about submitting to one’s imagination and the unknown.

Listen to Charlotte Simpson read two pieces whose theme is the lure of the unknown.

Michelle Schloss of Unionville, Conn., read a biographical poem, 18 stanzas each with 10 lines about Zelda Fitzgerald, from her wild Roaring Twenties days to her suicide in 1948.

Listen to Michelle Schloss read her biographical poem about Zelda Fitzgerald.

As a component of her senior thesis in acting, Jennifer Flanagan '12 was Grace Hoylard in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ production of Bus Stop. Photograph by Michael Reidy.

Jennifer Flanagan ’12 of Sherborn, Mass., discusses her role as Grace Hoylard in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater production of Bus Stop by William Inge. The performance was a component of Flanagan’s senior thesis in acting.

Click the audio player to hear the tale:

The trio was returning to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ after the NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships in Ohio last May. Their flight from Columbus to D.C. went fine, but the connecting flight from D.C. to Portland, Maine, had to turn back due to fog.

On the ground at Dulles, the trio couldn’t get another flight north, so they rented a Dodge Nitro and headed out, hoping to make a 10-hour trip in under nine hours, fueled by Twizzlers and Red Bulls, avoiding a wrong-way driver along the way.

Taska’s work will be performed on Sunday, April 10; Gurney’s on Friday, April 15; and Koster’s on Wednesday, April 27.

Taska has composed a score for the film “Little Otik,” a comedy combining live action and stop-motion animation by Czech director Jan Svankmajer. Based on the folktale “Otesánek,” the film shows a childless couple’s struggle to satisfy the cravings of a voracious stump that they have taken on as their “child.”

” ‘Little Otik’ was just the right movie to score because the extreme overall craziness that reigns throughout seemed particularly exciting in terms of composition,” said Taska, of Lowell, Vt.

Taska notes that 20th-century composers such as Stravinsky and Debussy have influenced his work. Taska’s score contains percussion, French horn, piano, and four wind and four stringed instruments. The piece will be performed by students and visiting professionals led by Hiroya Miura, conductor of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra.

Gurney, of Arlington, Va., offers a program consisting of a six-movement piece for clarinet, played by Rose Pruiksma; piano (Chiharu Naruse); bassoon (Ardith Keef); and cello (Shannon Allen).

Koster, of Pound Ridge, N.Y., presents music that explores conceptual and extra-musical frameworks for composition. Musicians will perform three of his works, and the composer will present a fourth through computer-generated sound and a PowerPoint display.

Koster received an internal ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant, the Ruggles Scholarship, to support his research for the project. His thesis explores the use of non-musical elements, such as video or a harmonic analysis of the human voice, as both the substance and an organizing principle for musical composition.

One of the pieces to be played by live musicians, for example, uses the mapping of a video image as its basis. Meanwhile, the orchestral piece that Koster will present with computer software and PowerPoint is based on the electronic analysis of voices.

One section of the piece uses the rising and falling pitches of speech as source material. Another is derived from a fragment of speech broken down into its component harmonics, which Koster assigned to different synthesized instruments.

“There are many discrete overtones, with their own volumes, in the voice,” he says. “The relationship of all these frequencies and how they interact with each other make up the timbre of a voice.”

His original idea was to travel around the country recording voices with different accents, and compose music that would reveal those regional differences.

“That was a little difficult to achieve, but what I did find was a fantastic method for arriving at intriguing harmonies, and that was the real value of the project,” he notes.

“You have so much information in just one second of audio that I would take one person saying one word, and that would make a 10-minute piece,” he explains, “just fleshing out those ideas and expanding things in different ways.”

So that section of music is derived solely from a resident of the South saying “off.”

A new CD on the Albany Records label is the latest result of a 20-year friendship between William Matthews, a composer on the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College music faculty, and his former student, pianist Duncan Cumming.

Released in January, A Book of Hours comprises four pieces composed by Matthews over a span of more than 20 years. In its CD debut as an ensemble, the Capital Trio, a chamber group featuring Cumming, plays on two of them. A third is performed by Cumming and violinist Hilary Cumming, his wife and Capital Trio bandmate. (Rounding out the trio is cellist Sölen Dikener.)

Matthews, who has taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 1978, is known for his stylistic versatility, his dedication to making music for the community and his leadership in equipping the college for electronic music-making — an interest still prominent in his work. A flutist and conductor as well as composer, his compositions include solo instrumental, vocal, chamber, orchestral, choral and theatrical music.

The Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and chair of the music department, Matthews has written music for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Modern Dance Company performances and an orchestral ode for the 2002 inauguration of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ president Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

“I’d like to think I’m one of the champions of his music,” says Cumming. A Maine native, Cumming graduated from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ with highest honors in 1993 and is now a concert musician and assistant professor of music at the University of Albany, State University of New York.

“I’ve played his music from Los Angeles to Aberdeen, Scotland,” says Cumming. The Capital Trio will perform two works from the CD in the Northeast and in Europe during the coming weeks.

One of them, which Cumming names as his favorite Matthews work, is the composition that gives the CD its title. Written in the mid-1990s, “A Book of Hours” is a secular interpretation of the religious practice of holding a daily cycle of worship services. In six movements, “Hours” draws on inspirations as diverse as a catbird’s song, the jolt of caffeine, a tranquil twilight and the music of French-Canadian fiddlers and jazzman Thelonious Monk.

In fact, the piece occasioned the production of the CD. “We recorded it a few years back,” Cumming says, “and on the advice of a colleague I sent it to Albany Records. They wanted to bring it out,” which led Matthews to assemble the rest of the music for the disc.

The Duo for Violin and Piano is also in the trio’s upcoming performances. Matthews composed the piece in 2000 as a wedding gift for the Cummings, thinking it would be fun to play when they had time alone together. Instead, “it’s a hit for them,” says Matthews.

Ranging across the genres from parlor music to Copland to tango, the Duo is a warm, colorful piece that clearly conveys the closeness of happy domesticity.

The CD’s other Capital Trio track honors the late music theorist and composer Jonathan Kramer, with whom Matthews studied as an undergraduate at Oberlin, as a grad student at Yale and during a summer seminar at Columbia. Completed in 2010, “For Jonathan Kramer” reflects Kramer’s thoughts about counterpoint and musical time.

The track also brings to the fore Matthews’ involvement with high-tech music-making, as it weaves together three strands: prerecorded sounds, the trio’s acoustic performance and Matthews’ real-time electronic manipulation of that acoustic music. “What they play is processed or echoed or pitch-shifted, and made mysterious. Every performance will be different,” he says.

Hear excerpts from A Book of Hours:

“Island” is the CD’s one track sans Capital Trio players. Like “A Book of Hours,” its framework is the passage of time, but this time the raw material comes directly from the world: soundscapes that Matthews recorded during a family vacation in Islesboro, and then edited and processed electronically. Birds, waves hissing across sand, children’s voices and a passing lobster boat are collaged into an atmospheric portrait of a day in a life.

“I’m very open to environmental influences,” says the composer. “I started college in the ’60s and I’m very much a student of John Cage’s ideas about getting the sounds of the world into the concert hall, and getting the sounds of the concert hall out into the world.”

For Matthews, in fact, creating music is a form of engagement with what’s around him — the environment and the people. He calls himself a “small-town composer.”

“I’m interested in making music for particular situations, local situations, and music that would be accessible by the participants in the audience.”

For much contemporary music, he adds, “There is really no audience for it. It’s far outside the experience of most people. And I guess I’ve been more interested in bonding with local audiences than writing pieces on spec for professional performances out of state.”

Winning makes us happy? Not so fast, says Associate Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina, author of .

In interviews prompted by his book, Duina explains that Americans’ zeal for victory, whether on the playing field or at the ballot box, leads us not to contentment but toward antagonism.

Interviewed by the public radio show , Duina notes that most surveys find that American’s are not a happy lot. “We are an anxious and worried people.”

A possible reason is linked to “our love of competition.” In much happier countries like Denmark, Duina notes that “children are taught lessons that to Americans sound almost offensive: that they are not to stand out and not to believe that they are good at anything.”

Yet in America, social pressure to compete, win and shine above the rest “creates its own enormous tensions and problems. We develop assumptions about the world, that we should approach others with an antagonistic mindset.”

• View stories in , Nov. 7, 2010, and , Oct. 9, 2010, and listen to , Nov. 25, 2010.

Duina, who chairs the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ sociology department, tells reporter Dan Hartill that his goal with Winning, his fourth book, “was to figure out what the language of competition is all about.”

Interviewed by , Duina says another result of a winner uber alles mindset is that the victor believes that “I win, therefore I’m right.” Yet it is flawed logic, he says, to “believe if we win at something then our world view in general is right. ‘I’m right, in general, if I win at basketball. I win the election to become governor, then I must have the right mindset.’… But it’s not that clear.”

The pair first analyzed a Michaud ad, below, about his support for Maine veterans seeking medical help. Garrand said, “It’s pretty tough for a back-bencher, and I say that lovingly,  to come up with a really definitive, I’ve-done-this-for-you advertising. But he’s come up with an issue that resonates terrifically and… is very authentic.”

Then the experts looked at an ad from Jason Levesque (below), which Garrand found “funny and compelling” and that “relies on a point of view that seems to be playing out across the nation right now: If you vote for Levesque you’re voting against Nancy Pelosi, who is a fairly disliked human being at this point.  It was appealing in that it was negative but upbeat.” Garrand pointed out that the two ads represent “the classic approach by the incumbent, and the classic approach by the upstart.”