By Cameron Lee ’22, on the Department of Music website
Allie Mangel graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 2022 with a degree in Comparative Literature and certificates in Violin Performance and Humanistic Studies. Her senior thesis, Transcribing Identity: Musico-Oral Transcription in Postcolonial Francophone Literature, combined her interests across performance and ethnomusicology, and became a driving force for her decision to pursue further graduate study in music. Following graduation, Allie was granted a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in Germany, where she continued to perform with local orchestras and chamber ensembles. Currently, she is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley.
What did you do right after graduating?
AM: I applied for a Fulbright English teaching assistantship in Germany and they placed me in Dresden. I was teaching English, but I was at a small school so I was teaching a lot of different things too. Because of the way the German program works, you’re only working 12 or 13 hours a week. It’s not very many. So that means I had a lot of time to do a lot of other stuff.
I thought at first that I wasn’t going to join an orchestra. I’d played violin in the Princeton University Orchestra for all four years and so initially I thought I’d take this time to try things that I hadn’t already done. But I missed music a lot since I hadn’t really been playing that much over the summer and then I got there and was encountering all these new things and I wanted something familiar. So I joined the Universitätsorchester Dresden while I was there and that was really fun. We went on tour around Germany and got to work with a lot of really interesting people. I also joined a Baroque orchestra, the Kammerorchester ohne Dirigenten, where we played Baroque music on modern instruments. So music ended up being the main thing that I did outside of teaching.
