About the author

• PhD, MA University of California, Berkeley
• M.Div Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA
• BA Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Steve Swayne teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present day, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in The Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and The Musical Quarterly. He has contributed to commentaries on Sondheim developed by the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., and the Chicago Lyric Opera. He has written two books — How Sondheim Found His Sound (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America’s Musical Life (Oxford University Press, 2011) — and is at work on a third that examines the life and music of musical theater composer William Finn. He is an accomplished concert pianist, with four nationally distributed recordings currently in release and a performance with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas to his credit. In addition to his work at Dartmouth, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at UC Berkeley.

Articles and presentations on William Schuman:

• William Schuman, World War II, and the Pulitzer Prize
• American Musicology at the Crossroads, Contemporary Music in the Crosshairs: The Ideological Battle at G. Schirmer, Inc. at the End of World War II (downloadable PDF)
• Irresistible Vision Meets Immovable Reality: William Schuman and the Lincoln Center Festivals of the 1960s [in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, late 2011)]
• William Schuman’s Puzzling Seventh Symphony (Library of Congress webcast)