Jan Swafford

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Jan Swafford (b. 1946) is an American composer and author who teaches Composition, Theory, and Musicology at Boston Conservatory and Writing at Tufts University. He is author of respected musical biographies of Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms, and the introductory Vintage Guide to Classical Music. He has often been heard as a musical commentator on NPR.

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."

Notable are his orchestral works Landscape with Traveler(1979-80), After Spring Rain (1981-82) and From the Shadow of the Mountain (2001), the 1985 piano quintet Midsummer Variations, the 1989 piano quartet They Who Hunger, and the 2002 piano trio They That Mourn, the latter in memoriam 9/11. His music has won a number of awards including an NEA Composer Grant , two Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowships, and a Tanglewood Fellowship.

Swafford is currently at work on a piece for solo cello and a biography of Beethoven.