Beethoven biography jan swafford author
Jan Swafford
American author and composer (born )
Jan Swafford (born September 10, ) is an American author and composer.
Beethoven biography jan swafford author composer wiki Back Flap. His definitive tome on the greatest composer to have ever lived mines historical documentation—personal letters, press clippings, reviews, memoirs, etc. It may be hard to grasp, but surrender to it and it's easy to be swept away. That's because Swafford comes marvelously equipped to take on the enormousness of Beethoven's life and work — his heights of inspiration, depths of suffering, the roots and range of his masterworks.He earned his Bachelor of Artsmagna cum laude from Harvard College and his M.M.A. and D.M.A. from the Yale School of Music. His teachers included Earl Kim at Harvard, Jacob Druckman at Yale, and Betsy Jolas at Tanglewood.[1] He has written respected musical biographies of Charles Ives, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as well as the Vintage Guide to Classical Music.
He appeared in the award-winning German documentary The Unanswered Ives.
Beethoven biography jan swafford author wikipedia Works [ edit ]. Beethoven tended to love above his class, ever unrequited, enamored of young countesses. Less romantically, he suffered chronic gastrointestinal illness. And so the reader is given a well-focused tour of all things Ludwig — from his birth in Bonn, Germany, in , to his death in , during which he grew from child piano prodigy not unlike his musical forebear, Mozart to gloomy titan, casting the thunderbolt sonorities and elysian beauties of the 5th and 9th symphonies, the "Pastorale," the darkly lyrical concertos.Works
Swafford has written 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, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and Carnegie Hall.
His writing honors include a 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 New York Times. The Ives biography 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.
Beethoven biography jan swafford author name Fortunately, Swafford's Beethoven: Anquish and Triumph doesn't drown in its musicology so much as achieve a buoyant balance of technical and human detail. And so the reader is given a well-focused tour of all things Ludwig — from his birth in Bonn, Germany, in , to his death in , during which he grew from child piano prodigy not unlike his musical forebear, Mozart to gloomy titan, casting the thunderbolt sonorities and elysian beauties of the 5th and 9th symphonies, the "Pastorale," the darkly lyrical concertos. Beethoven crowns classical music as the most prodigious of all the classical composers, immortalized for unleashing, as in the case of his Symphony No. In a handful of sentences, Swafford delivers a great deal of information: how familiar musical gestures — a half step down on the third beat — can be transformed by a unique sensibility, how the "new immediacy and subjectivity" of the music was revolutionary, and how this expressiveness defines Romanticism, an all-too-familiar word that too few of us can easily define.His biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in its first week appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
He has taught at schools including Boston University, Amherst College, Tufts, and Boston Conservatory.
Swafford's music, which is highly lyrical and moves freely between tonality and atonality, has been called New Romantic in style.[by whom?] 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."[This quote needs a citation]
Notable are his orchestral works Landscape with Traveler (–80), After Spring Rain (–82) and From the Shadow of the Mountain (), the piano quintetMidsummer Variations (), the piano quartetThey Who Hunger (), and the piano trioThey That Mourn (), the last in memoriam 9/ In cellist Rhonda Rider premiered his solo cello work The Silence at Yuma Point, part of a commissioning project of pieces inspired by the Grand Canyon (where Swafford has been a frequent hiker).
Beethoven biography jan swafford author It is the voice that is new in this sonata, the emotional immediacy… As a revelation of individual character and emotion, it was a kind of democratic revolution in music. The author of acclaimed biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives, Swafford is also a celebrated composer, musical scholar and teacher whose empathic vision of Beethoven extends far beyond the typical biographer's focus on the facts of a life. Download our App. Swafford's music, which is highly lyrical and moves freely between tonality and atonality , has been called New Romantic in style.His compositional awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Composer Grant, two Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowships, and a Tanglewood Fellowship. His work is published by Peermusic Classical and Meridian Records.