JAN SWAFFORD

Composer & writer

Jan Swafford (born September 10, 1946) is an American author and composer. He earned his Bachelor of Arts magna 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. 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 2018 German documentary The Unanswered Ives.

Jan Swafford's music has been played around the country and abroad by ensembles including the symphonies of St. Louis, Indianapolis, and the Dutch Radio; Boston's new-music groups Musica Viva, Collage, and Dinosaur Annex; and chamber ensembles including the Peabody Trio, the Chamber Orchestra of Tennessee, and the Scott Chamber Players of Indianapolis.

Over the years his music has evolved steadily, but in all its avatars his work is forthrightly expressive, individual in voice, and steadily concerned with lucidity of texture and form. Beneath the surface there are contributions from world music, especially Indian and Balinese, and from jazz and blues. The titles of his works—including Landscape with Traveler, From the Shadow of the Mountain, and The Silence at Yuma Point—reveal a steady inspiration from nature. The composer views his work as a kind of classicism: a concern with clarity and directness, pieces that seem familiar though they are new, that aspire to sound like they wrote themselves.

Also a well-known writer on music, Swafford is author of biographies of Ives, Brahms, and Beethoven. His journalism appears regularly in Slate. He is a long-time program writer and preconcert lecturer for the Boston Symphony and has written program notes and essays for the orchestras of Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto.