Holy Cross Senior Earns Watson Fellowship

Matthew S. Mohorovich, a member of the Class of 2008 at the College of the Holy Cross, has been awarded the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for his self-designed research project titled “All that Jazz: Feeling the Beat in the Balkans.”

Mohorovich, a philosophy and biology double major from Astoria, Queens, N.Y., will study in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro next year as he explores the connection between jazz and suffering in the Balkans. He is one of 50 college seniors nationwide selected to receive a 2008-2009 Watson. The fellowship with a stipend of $25,000, is a one-year grant for independent study and travel abroad.

The idea for the project started several years ago when he attended a concert in Worcester that featured Danilo Perez, the pianist for the late Dizzy Gillespie. Mohorovich noticed something interesting as he reviewed the program: Perez was only playing a handful of cities across Europe, and three were in the Balkans (Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade). He later learned that a number of jazz greats had performed in the Balkans, including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golson, Ornette Coleman, and many others.

“When one normally thinks of jazz one conjures to mind the roaring twenties: a time of prosperity, joy, and optimism, a time in which one could not help but think, ‘What a wonderful world.’ But a ‘wonderful world’ would certainly not describe the Balkans of the mid-’90s,” says Mohorovich. The Balkans was a world characterized by death, destruction, and genocide; a world that was left abandoned and ignored. “When we look at jazz in the Balkans we do not see the themes of joy and prosperity. We see the themes of suffering and loss. We find the true roots of jazz.”

In the 1990s, war engulfed the Balkans bringing immense suffering and loss. But within this period of tremendous suffering, jazz actually grew stronger throughout the region. In 1996, in the wake of disaster, an international jazz festival, now going on its 12th year, was created in the heart of war-torn Bosnia.

“The fact that this festival started so soon after a time of devastation suggests that there really is a crucial connection between the experience of suffering and jazz, and it also suggests, to the people of the region, jazz is something more than abstract and intangible,” Mohorovich says.

He continues: “The Balkans is located in a place where worlds meet or, more accurately, collide — in nearly every sense and with intense passion: ‘East’ and ‘West,’ North and South, Christianity and Islam. When most people think of cities in the Balkans — cities like Sarajevo — they think of a war-torn wasteland; a place of genocide; a place which, in the 1990s, proved peaceful co-existence across lines of human difference impossible. If we look back at the region’s more distant history, after the Spanish Inquisition, we find a whole different Sarajevo: a place where Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians peacefully co-existed in harmony; one of the few places throughout the world, and throughout human history in which this has occurred.”

Through the genocides of the 20th century, much of that harmony was destroyed, and the memory of the harmony that existed in the past has been overshadowed and forgotten, not so much by the people of Sarajevo, but by the rest of the world.

“If there is one thing that gives the region, and the world, hope it is the amount change that has occurred in the last decade in Sarajevo, and many other cities throughout the Balkans. People, who only a decade ago were sworn mortal enemies, are now seen in many areas working, living, and playing side by side, Mohorovich says. “The Sarajevo of the distant past, and the Sarajevo of the immediate present, compels us to ask an important question about the divided unstable world we live in today, namely: Does it really have to be this way?”

Jazz is not just a form of music; it is a state of mind, Mohorovich contends. “Jazz is a way to envision a community beyond ethnic and religious divides. It is a state of mind that values difference and diversity; individualism and yet community. Jazz gives us hope, yet, in the words of Cornell West, a hope that is ‘neither optimistic nor pessimistic.’ This hope, just like jazz itself, is grounded in the blues, and actualized through a ‘Blues people.’ What makes a ‘Blues people’ is not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion, but the way they look at the world through the lens of suffering and loss: through the ‘lens of catastrophe.’ There is something about jazz that speaks to people who suffer. There is something about people who suffer that speaks to jazz.”

By immersing himself in the cultures he enters, and using his background as a jazz musician, Mohorovich plans to discover and experience this something in the Balkans.

Mohorovich has worked on original arrangements for the Holy Cross Chamber Orchestra with Eric Culver, lecturer and director of the orchestra; and has done jazz composition, jazz performance, harmony, and arranging tutorials with Michael Monaghan, lecturer and director of the jazz ensemble.

Prior to Holy Cross, he studied with Mike Ledonne, a New York-based jazz pianist. He was invited to be part of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Jazz for Teens program and Youth Ensemble in Newark, N.J., from 2003-2004, in which he studied under the direction of Don Braden, Valery Ponomarev, and Joris Teepe. In the summer of 2004, he was a part of a group which opened for Arturo Sandoval, a leading figure of the modern Afro-Cuban Jazz movement, in the Litchfield Jazz Festival.

During his career at Holy Cross, Mohorovich has participated in Appalachia and Habitat for Humanity. He was a leader for an Appalachia Spring Break Immersion group this past spring break. He is a member of Phi Sigma Tau, and the College Honors Program, and will be presenting his senior thesis at the end of April.