A Mac Arthur Award for Gary Tomlinson '73

Gary Tomlinson '73, a musicologist and department chairman at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded a $235,000 Mac Arthur Foundation Fellowship, making him the third Dartmouth alumnus in the last two years to win the "genius" grant.

Tomlinson's specialty is the music of Renaissance Italy, focusing on nineteenth century Italian opera, as well as on the composer Monteverdi. In 1987 he published Monteverdi andThe End of the Renaissance. Says Tomlinson, "I look at myself as a cultural historian, even as an anthropological historian, not so much using music to study music itself, but to reflect the culture."

Mac Arthur Fellows are chosen for general excellence, not for a particular accomplishment or a proposed project. The money, distributed over a five-year period, has no strings attached. The grants cannot be applied for and the Foundation's selection process is extremely secretive. The phone call notifying Tomlinson of his award came "out of the blue," he says. "I didn't expect them to be tapping me on the shoulder."

The 36 year old Tomlinson makes his devotion to his work apparent. His current project is a book on the relationship between music and magic. "Of fundamental concern," he says, "is how we come to understand very distant ways of thought and very foreign perceptions of the world. The most foreign is the occult mentality a belief in the world as a magical place that is animated by all kinds of hidden forces." Tomlinson says his book will explore the side of Renaissance ideology that interacts with music.

Tomlinson spent his first years at Dartmouth studying biochemistry, running on the cross-country track team, and playing trumpet in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra.

Tomlinson says music had always been an important interest, but that he was headed toward a career in medicine. A junior year spent at Wellesley convinced him to change his course. The "possibilities [in music] and the historic dimensions of it just took me by storm." After part of a senior year in Vienna on the Dartmouth Foreign Study Program, he graduated with a major in music instead of biochemistry.

Following graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, Tomlinson joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Lucy Kerman, who is in academic administration and fund-raising at Bryn Mawr, have a son David, 2, and another child on the way.

Tomlinson won't use the money to leave teaching and pursue research full time, as other Mac Arthur recipients have done. Instead, he'll take year off to finish his book, and then continue to .alternate teaching with research. "I love teaching ... I do want to keep in touch with the students who will be going through here."