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Jan Swafford is an American composer and author who teaches composition, theory, and music history at The Boston Conservatory. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard College and his M.M.A. and D.M.A. from the Yale School of Music. His teachers included Earle Kim at Harvard, Jacob Druckman at Yale, and Betsy Jolas at Tanglewood. He has written respected musical biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms, as well as the introductory Vintage Guide to Classical Music".
He writes regular columns on music and other subjects in Slate, and is heard as a commentator on NPR and the BBC. He is a regular program annotator for orchestras and venues including the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Carnegie Hall. He is completing a biography of Beethoven, due out in 2014.
His writing honors include a 2012 Deems Taylor Award for internet writing and a Mellon Fellowship at Harvard. His Brahms and Ives biographies were end-of-year Critics' Choices in the NY Times. The Ives was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in biography and won the Pen-Winship prize for a book on a New England subject.
Swafford's own music, which is highly lyrical and moves freely between tonality and atonality, has been called New Romantic in style. There are equal if less overt contributions from world music, especially Indian and Balinese, and from jazz and blues. The titles of his works reveal a steady inspiration from nature and landscape. The composer views his own work as a kind of classicism: a concern with clarity, directness, and expression, or as he puts it, "music that sounds familiar though it is new, works that sound like they wrote themselves."
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