The experience was eye opening. “I remember opening the score to the ‘Rite of Spring,’” Cheung says. “I had never seen anything like it in my life. After somehow following the score with a recording, it was a total out-of-body experience.” It was moments like these that convinced Cheung that music was indeed his calling.

Cheung says his style has become more consistent over the years but is still developing. He draws influence from “everything in the Western tradition” but is partial to French music after Debussy and jazz of all kinds. “You are what you hear, and I hope to be hearing a lot more unfamiliar music that will influence my future work,” he says.

But the journey has been difficult. In addition to monetary constraints and public apathy, “composition can be the most frustrating thing in the world,” Cheung says. However, he remains optimistic. “It’s in those rare instances when someone tells you that what you’ve done has affected them that gives a composer the sense of having made a difference,” he says. “The challenge and reward is refining your craft.”

Cheung points to his guidance over the past four years from professors Robinson Professor of Music Robert D. Levin ’68 and Rosen Professor of Music Bernard Rands as his most fullfilling academic experience. He says their work with piano and composition continues to inspire him today.

Next year will find Cheung at Columbia University in the graduate program in composition. “I’m looking forward to hearing all the exciting new music that’s being presented in New York,” he says. Beyond that remains unclear, though he says he hopes to teach and write. In any case, he points to the uncertainty as part of the excitement.

—Akash Goel

GEORDIE F. BROADWATER ’04

Although as this year’s recipient of the Jonathan Levey Award in Drama, Geordie F. Broadwater ’04 may be recognized as Harvard’s most promising undergraduate actor, Broadwater actually hopes that his future artistic path will lead him to the world behind the mainstage. Next year, the Eliot House resident plans to pursue Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium.

But don’t expect Broadwater to close the door on his acting pursuits any time soon. As he tells it, “People experience passion in various activities: learning, sports, writing, sex. You need passion in your life—and there’s little I wouldn’t give up for acting.”

Impelled by this hunger to perform, in his four years at Harvard, Broadwater has played not only Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, Larry in Closer and the Man in The Blue Room, but also Gus in The Dumbwaiter and Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Even while pursuing this repertoire of characters in such rather weighty dramatic works, Broadwater has managed to keep a sense of humor. Indeed, Broadwater admits that he selects his project based on the “innovation, emotion, humor, violence, and beauty” that a work shows.

Broadwater also acknowledged that he was not always so bold in tackling theater and noted that he has only recently been able to realize his hopes of contributing to popular, entertaining, and ground-breaking productions as a director on Harvard’s Mainstage.

Explaining his penchant exploring unchartered territory and directing independent student works, Broadwater says, “I’m tired of seeing the same plays over and over. [Although] revisiting classic texts is important and extremely fun, I think that we need to expand our canon and search beyond Shakespeare, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams for new plays to do. Performing a student-written play is almost always worth doing, unless of course the play is terrible, which sometimes they are.”

Next month, Broadwater will enter a world beyond student-authored works, but he is confident that he will carry with him the indelible impression of his time at Harvard. Indeed, Broadwater credits Harvard for instilling in him the desire to set high standards for his own theatrical creations. “[Thanks to Harvard,] my artistic ambitions are inexorably based in a highly intellectual mindframe, and while I strive to create theatre that is visceral, emotional and accessible, I’m confident in my ability to tackle complicated and intelligent subject matter.”

Broadwater also believes his politically-charged classmates may have rubbed off on him. “Perhaps it is merely a reflection of the times, but I believe that my peers at Harvard have awakened a political awareness in me that would have otherwise have remained dormant,” he says. “I can’t help but comment on and reflect socio-political currents in my work.”