Rachel Kincaid

Rachel Kincaid, a 21-year-old trumpet player and composer at the Eastman School of Music, part of the University of Rochester, New York, has been awarded a prestigious Marshall Scholarship to pursue two advanced degrees in the United Kingdom. She will begin a one-year master’s degree program in trumpet performance next fall at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, and start work on a second master’s degree in composition the following year at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

Kincaid, an applied music major who has written pieces at the request of Eastman faculty and of the Swiss publisher Editions BIM, is among 37 winners of the 2008 Marshall Scholarships from across the United States and the first from the University of Rochester to earn the honor since 1988.

A native of Wooster, Ohio, where she sang in a Lutheran church choir and first picked up a trumpet in the fifth grade, Kincaid plans to use her music to move people to confront social ills, such as poverty, war, and environmental troubles. “I want to use music to expand people’s way of thinking, to make them think about something that they wouldn’t otherwise,” said Kincaid, who cites Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima among her inspirations. “No one can listen to that piece and know the title and not think about the moral implications of using nuclear technology,” she said. “Whether it changes people’s opinions or not, it at least makes them think about it.”

The Marshall Scholarship program was established in 1953 by the British Parliament as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for assistance received after World War II under the Marshall Plan. The scholarships award highly-qualified American undergraduates and recent college graduates with two years of fully funded study at any university in the United Kingdom.

“Rachel Kincaid is an exceptional young composer and musician and we are thrilled to have her as a Marshall Scholar,” said Ray Raymond, chairman of the New York Marshall Regional Selection Committee. “Rachel has that rare combination of academic and personal excellence, outstanding academic ability, grace, modesty and maturity. Her potential is limitless.”

The scholarship will offer a second opportunity to learn abroad for Kincaid, who spent last year studying under trumpeter/composer Anthony Plog at the renowned Freiburg Musikhochschule in Germany through the Eastman Conservatory Exchange Program. Kincaid currently studies trumpet at Eastman with James Thompson and composition with Marco Alunno.

Links:
Eastman School of Music
Full Kincaid story (University of Rochester press release)
Marshall Scholarship
Royal Northern College of Music
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama