Michael and Rebecca McGoodwin Endowed Scholarship
to benefit Music Performance majors
A passion for music deepened their bonds and enriched their marriage, leading Michael and Rebecca McGoodwin many times to the concert halls and classrooms of the University of Washington School of Music, where they first attended performances in the early 1970s during Michael’s medical residency at the UW.
Over the course of their 50-year union, they took an active and inquisitive approach to their shared love of music. The soundtrack of their marriage, eclectic and wide-ranging, would be partial to the Western art repertoire but would include a little bit of everything, from the great orchestral works, symphonies, and ballets to sacred choral music, organ works, and an array of popular and world music encompassing artists from Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Astor Piazzolla, and many more. They loved it all, and loved opera most of all, a lifelong passion galvanized for Michael with a 1962 performance of Don Giovanni at the old Met in New York City.
By the time Michael lost Rebecca to cancer this past summer, they had already planned for a meaningful tribute to their shared lives in music, establishing this past year the Michael and Rebecca McGoodwin Endowed Scholarship in Music Performance at the School of Music to create enduring support for performance majors at the UW. The McGoodwins say they created the fund in gratitude for all they gained at the School of Music and invited friends and family to join them in contributing.
“We have benefitted greatly from the rich musical life at the UW, not only through the great variety of performances offered but from music courses as well,” the couple wrote in a recent biography, citing evening courses they took in the 1970s to learn more about operas like Thaïs, Aida, and Eugene Onegin, as well as daytime courses they have audited since 2006. In those, they enhanced their understanding of tonal music through instruction by former faculty theorist Áine Heneghan and deepened their knowledge of lieder, sacred choral music, politics and music, Americana, popular American music, and many other topics in courses led by Music History professors George Bozarth, Larry Starr, and Stephen Rumph.
“With great appreciation and gratitude for all of the benefits we have received from the UW School of Music, we are pleased to endow this fund,” Michael and Rebecca wrote. “We hope our modest contribution will be of assistance to aspiring students of music performance, and we wish them all great success.”
“We deeply appreciate Michael and Rebecca’s support for our students,” said School of Music director Richard Karpen. “They have been members of our community for more than four decades, which makes their contributions even more meaningful. The Michael and Rebecca McGoodwin Endowed Scholarship in Music Performance will make an important difference for our students. We are grateful.”
To learn more about this fund, email Stephanie Kornfeld, kornsf@uw.edu, call 206.616.1709, or make a gift online at www.giving.uw.edu/McGoodwin.