A Florida State University doctoral student in musicology, Elizabeth Clendinning, has won the highly competitive Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the U.S. Department of State, enabling her to study Indonesian abroad at an intensive summer language institute.

Clendinning, who will study Indonesian in Malang, Indonesia for about 10 weeks this summer, is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology. Clendinning, whose hometown is Tallahassee, received a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from FSU in 2009 and a bachelor’s degree in music (with honors) from the University of Chicago in 2007.

“In my doctoral research, I will be exploring cosmopolitanism and globalism in Balinese music and dance and will be using my newly acquired research skills to interview individuals in the performing arts,” Clendinning said. “I am very fortunate right now to be the assistant director of FSU’s Balinese gamelan, Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung, and the associated dance program, and upon graduation, I hope to become a university professor and be able to study and teach about the Indonesian musical arts.” A gamelan is an Indonesian musical ensemble composed mainly of percussion instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums, and gong. Clendinning, who plays all of these instruments to some degree and who also dances with the associated troupe, has learned some basic Indonesian from her dance teacher and from reading.

In addition to instruction, the scholarship includes travel expenses; an orientation program in Washington, D.C.; room and board in countries where the students are studying; group cultural enrichment activities; and side trips. Begun in 2006, the CLS program originally offered six languages of study. As of 2010, it offered 13 languages: Arabic, Persian, Azerbaijani, Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.

Additionally, three undergraduate students received the scholarship: Kate Layton (for Arabic), Cornelius “C.J.” Canton (for Urdu), and Denise Correll (for Mandarin Chinese). Layton, Canton, and Correll have worked closely with their instructors in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.