Senior Spotlight: Kelly K.W. Lam

Kelly K.W. Lam ’13 holds a piano book in her lap. “It’s a collection of Chopin nocturnes,” she says. “They’re always fun to play, especially when you are in a contemplative mood.” Lam admits that her bedroom is littered with piano books—her ability to play was already well developed by the time she reached college. However, Lam’s main musical interest since she began at Harvard has been singing.

“When I came, I just really wanted to try something new,” Lam says. “I wanted to expand my horizons. For me, singing was just so intriguing—it’s a kind of connection between your bodily and spiritual and musical selves. To me, that was mind-blowing. Even today, I think there is something really cool about singing that no other instrument can have.”

Her freshman year, Lam started from scratch. “I got interested because my roommate here was a singer. I joined the choir she was in—the Harvard University Choir—and then started taking lessons. Now I sing pretty much every day. It’s been a great experience.”

Every Sunday, Lam sings with the Choir at the Memorial Church service. This week, for Arts First, the Choir will be performing Bach’s B minor Mass. “It’s a gigantic work with many challenging choruses. It’s very musically challenging and diverse in terms of styles,” Lam says. She will also perform a series of a cappella numbers with the Choir’s subset, Choral Fellows, and will have her own solo performance.

Music seemed to encompass all aspects of Lam’s senior year. A history of art and architecture concentrator, Lam has been able to interweave her extracurricular interests and her academic work. “I wrote my thesis on the role of music in Venetian Renaissance paintings and how paintings can have musical qualities,” Lam says. “I was very interested in how music plays itself out in the realm of art.”

—Staff writer Adabelle U. Ekechukwu can be reached at aekechukwu14@college.harvard.edu.