Enduring legacy of UWF music scholarship

The legacy of a longtime music enthusiast in Pensacola will benefit generations of University of West Florida (UWF) students.

A $166,000 gift will establish the Doris Jean Kahn Music Scholarship Endowment, supporting music students through an annual competition.

When Doris Jean Kahn arrived in Pensacola in 1946, she was already an experienced musician. She expressed her devotion to the art by joining the Pensacola Music Study Club and supporting the Pensacola Symphony and Pensacola Opera.

A special interest of hers was the Pensacola Music Study Club's scholarship competition for teens. The competition, hosted by the university, provides $1,000 scholarships to students between the ages of 14 and 19. The categories are strings, piano juniors, piano seniors, woodwind/brass and voice. Runners-up in each category receive an award of $200.

Dr. Sheila Dunn, chair of the UWF Department of Music, received one of those scholarships. "The Music Study Club's scholarship competition is near and dear to my heart," Dunn said. She won the Doris Jean Kahn scholarship in 1994 as a junior in high school and used the funding to attend Interlochen Summer Arts Camp. "Without question," she says, "that summer experience was the beginning of my journey toward becoming a professional musician. I am absolutely thrilled that the scholarship competition will live on to inspire future generations of young musicians."

The next scholarship competition will be held March 16th, 2019. It will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Pensacola Music Study Club.

Kahn's daughter, Dottie Kahn Galloway, said, "My mother enjoyed and studied music all her life. She would be so pleased to know her legacy continues through a scholarship endowment in her memory that encourages young music students in pursuit of excellence in performance."

UWF leaders say the endowment, given by the Robert H. Kahn, Jr. Family Foundation, will allow the competition and the scholarships to continue in perpetuity.

‘Kids in America’ singer returns to music because of UFOs

“Kids in America” singer Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 was one of the reasons she decided to return to music and make a comeback.
                                                 

Wilde told the BBC after leaving the music business she got married and raised her children. However, two events pushed her to come back and give music a second chance.

Wilde claims she had an encounter with a UFO in 2009. She said she was sitting in the garden at her home with a glass of wine when she saw something.

“Then I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud. Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon,” she said.

“I said to my husband and my friend, ‘That’s really odd,’ so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source. All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11 o’clock to 1 o’clock. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes,” Wilde recalled.

“Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air — but it was silent. Absolutely silent.

The singer said she thinks about the moment every day and it gave her an idea for her new album, “Here Comes the Aliens.”

She sings on the album that maybe the aliens will “save us from the apocalypse.”

She said her career started to flatline in the 1990s when she became older and felt she could not keep up.

“I’d been in it since I was 20, then I was 36 and everyone, I felt, was doing it a lot better than I was. They had the ambition that I didn’t have anymore. When Madonna came along, I didn’t feel I could compete, so I said, ‘You know what? You’re best off being who you are, and that’s going to have to be enough,’” Wilde told the BBC. “Sometimes it was, and a lot of the time it wasn’t.”