|
Posted 09/04/02
Steve Swayne likes to remind his students that there was a time when music wasn't just background sound or dance accompaniment, but a primary listening experience.
"American society doesn't privilege music this way. We're not accustomed to shutting down our senses and just focusing on the music," says Swayne, an assistant professor of music who teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century art music, opera, American musical theater, and Russian music.
Helping students engage more fully in music-particularly when the genre is unfamiliar to them-can be a rewarding challenge, he says, especially in his opera class.
"Students fear opera. They think it's so foreign that they'll never come to like it. What inevitably happens is they are swept away by the beauty of the music and the power of the drama," he says. He remembers one student who was so captivated after listening to a Wagner opera for an assignment that he listened to the composer's 16-hour Ring of the Nibelung cycle on his own.
Swayne's interest in musical drama recently earned him a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He will use the grant to work on a book that examines how noted composer Stephen Sondheim uses music as a dramatic tool.
"Sondheim was one of the first musical theater composers whose music works the way opera works," Swayne says. "It tells you in musical terms the thoughts and actions of the characters."
An accomplished pianist, Swayne has to his credit four nationally distributed recordings and a performance with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. He previously taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to academe, he worked as a minister to college students.
"I've been working with college students for 25 years and I still feel called to work with this age group," he says. "The aspect of this age that appeals to me is that these men and women are still flexible and playful enough in their thinking that they can be moved to think about new things."
Working in a liberal arts environment where most of his students are not music majors gives Swayne the opportunity to make the arts part of his students' daily experience. He remembers fondly a poem that his mother kept on a kitchen corkboard:
If thou of fortune be bereft
And in thy storehouse there be left
Two loaves: sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
Adds Swayne, "There is never a time when we don't need beauty in our lives."
|
