Interest in religious discipline underlies Cole's pursuits
Nora Beck combines art and academia
Nora Beck combines art and academia
by Katy DavidsonSynthesis seems to be a major theme in Nora Beck’s life.
This professor of music learned discipline from playing basketball and passion from playing piano as a child. Now, as a teacher, she is known for combining art with academia and encouraging students’ creative endeavors.
Beck’s leave for sabbatical last semester, her approaching bid for tenure, and her upcoming LC overseas trip to London, have placed her under the spotlight lately.
Beck grew up in Queens, New York, then moved 20 miles north of Manhattan at age 10 to attend Scarsdale Public High School. She has been bilingual in Italian and English practically since birth. Beck’s mother is Italian and her father, an art history professor, spent his sabbatical in Italy when she was a child.
She said she always felt like a part of the academic world. “Growing up, teachers and teaching were the most important things to me,” Beck said. “I always wanted to learn.” She spread her desire for knowledge beyond the doors of the regular classroom and began taking piano lessons at age seven with a teacher in New York City.
“My piano lessons were very important to me, too,” she said. “I felt it was a place I could be expressive as a young person. I tended to be quite shy and music was a way to explore myself.”
She said her mother originally wanted her to be a pianist, so she arranged the teachers and the lessons. “She was a stage mother… she always wanted me to perform and I was always really shy. It was torture,” Beck said. The “torture” eventually turned into a passion: Beck took lessons until she was 25.
Beck also spent her childhood living periodically in Italy with her family, and discovering a love for basketball. “I felt this was all part of a tapestry I was becoming,” she said.
She said her father also loved basketball so he taught her how to play when she was little. Occasionally, though, the basketball and piano lessons became activities of conflicting interest. “I’d jam my fingers during basketball sometimes and I couldn’t play for my piano teacher,” she said.
Beck played four years of basketball at Barnard College, where she was named a “Small School All-American in Division 3.” She said that playing basketball gave her self-discipline. “I’ve always felt that discipline is the most important part of an education,” Beck said.
After her run at Barnard, Beck took some time off. “I didn’t want to be an academic at first because my father was an academic and I didn’t want to do the same thing. I took some years off after I graduated from college,” she said.
She originally got a job as a secretary, then another job monitoring the parts division at the Fiat car company headquarters.
After some time in the real world, Beck said, “I really understood what most of America does and how limiting it felt to me.” She decided to return to her schooling at Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D.
“The thing about being an academic is it’s a wonderful freedom. I felt like I didn’t have any freedom in the 9 to 5 job. But it gave me wonderful perspective. When everyone was falling asleep in graduate seminar, I was busy taking notes in the front row with a big smile,” she said. Beck said she generally encourages students to take some time off before they go back to school.
Now in her fifth year at LC, Beck just returned from a sabbatical spent working on a collection of music and art from 14th-century Padua, Italy, at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She said she was able to “put together a good chunk” of her latest project. She also traveled to Padua for three weeks last semester to complete some on-site research.
“Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento,” a book Beck completed before she left for sabbatical, is in press and should come out in five or six months.
Next up for Beck is a trip to London as the leader of the LC overseas group next semester. Following her own tradition of integrating education and creativity, she decided each student would have the choice to work as an intern or draft a manuscript for a novel for his or her final project. The idea for the novel developed after thinking about her own past.
“I kept thinking, ‘what was I doing when I was 21?’ I was obviously writing a diary as many people write diaries when they go overseas, but I thought, ‘why not take it one step further?’ You can use your daily life and the new life you have around you as part of the story,” Beck said.
No matter where her teaching brings her, Beck uses creative tactics to educate. She said she was raised in an environment where the artists and the academics were the same people. Since there was not a division when she was younger, it feels natural to combine the two today, she said.
“My goal is for the student to be expressive and take ownership of the material...to find their own meaning in it,” Beck said. “I want students to really know the material, not memorize it. That’s also why I use creative methods to teach. That’s how I feel you really learn it. My greatest joy is to see a student learn.”
