Helping Music Students Achieve Their Dreams
Alum Clare Hodgson Meeker established a fellowship to help School of Music students pursue their dreams

Illustration by Silke Werzinger
Alum Clare Hodgson Meeker established a fellowship to help School of Music students pursue their dreams
Clare Hodgson Meeker will never forget studying abroad during her junior year at BU. The music major was encouraged by her voice instructor to travel to Paris and take lessons with the renowned singer Pierre Bernac. “My teacher had himself been a student of Bernac’s,” says Meeker (’75), “and he thought that because I have a fairly high, very clear voice— not a big vibrato, not an opera singer—that studying with Bernac would be a wonderful experience for me.”
By then, Bernac was retired (he died in 1979), but he took Meeker under his wing. “He treated me like his granddaughter,” she says. “He was just lovely.” To this day, Meeker, who lives in Friday Harbor, Wash., and is a children’s book author and longtime member of the feminist folk band The Righteous Mothers, still has the two sheets filled with vocal exercises Bernac gave her. “They’re behind laminated plastic, and I still use them.”
While studying with Bernac was a highlight of her time abroad, Meeker also fondly remembers becoming immersed in Paris’ culture and becoming fluent in French. “By the end of my studies there, I could speak like a taxi driver,” she says. “I studied French in school, but there’s nothing like being there in person, speaking with people.”
In 2019, Meeker was reflecting on her time in Paris when she decided to support similar opportunities for current School of Music students. She established the Clare Hodgson Meeker Endowed Fellowship, which helps fund summer travel for students to further their education. Meeker says each year the fellowship has supported around 40 students, whose pursuits have included attending and performing in the Musa Hellenica Festival in Chios, Greece, traveling across the US to compete in the Drum Corps International, and taking part in the Berlin Opera Academy.
“I wanted to focus on undergraduates because they’re still trying to figure out what it is they want to do,” Meeker says. “They’re so full of hope and promise.”
I wanted to focus on undergraduates because they’re still trying to figure out what it is they want to do. They’re so full of hope and promise.”
Many students have used the fellowship funding to learn valuable new skills. Meeker recalls a student from the first year of the fellowship who wanted to attend piano tuner school. “He was thinking very practically and saw it as a way to make money while in school and during the summers,” she says. “And it’s helped support him beautifully.”
Another student used funding he received to brush up on his live performance skills and travel around New England presenting his research on disability inclusion in music education. Another spent time in Kyoto, Japan, to learn about the Japanese theater forms Kabuki and Noh.
“There was a bass player that went to see a jazz musician in the Midwest, and that person taught them a whole different method for playing bass. They came back really changed by the experience,” says Meeker, who enjoys hearing from all of the fellowship students.
Meeker is grateful to have helped more than one hundred School of Music students since establishing the fellowship. “These kids are getting out there, seeing other places, having that experience of personal growth and going out of their comfort zone,” she says. “That was huge for me. I had such a sheltered life, and it just made a huge difference.”