JOHN SWACKHAMER

What we loved about him - What we learned - What we're still learning

John Swackhamer died in September 18, 2006. Today, Nov. 11, 2006 is his memorial. It's also my birthday -- and Swack has been one of the great gifts I've gotten in this life.

In trying to distill the profound influence John Swackhamer has had on my life, I can say: John Swackhamer was a place to find the truth. He told me the truth - always -- and he challenged me to tell my own truth -- always. He helped me see where the truth was - and where it wasn't. It's wrenching to write this in the past tense, because Swack's challenges to me are as present in my life today as when he first gave them.

When I heard that John had died, I sat down and made a list of some of the ideas and challenges he gave me. I sent it to my friend Gunnar and asked for a similar list from him. I was amazed that his list was completely different from mine (I was also jealous because his was so cool!). I felt like his list opened a whole new Window of Swackhamer for me. I put both lists below. If you knew John Swackhamer and you're willing to send me what you remember that he taught you, I’ll add your list here when I have time — and I'll read what you write greedily. Because I’m not done learning from Swack. John Swackhamer is still my teacher. And oddly, I never had a single class with him. (DHC 11/11/06)

9/20/06 DHC

I remember the most important things he told me, not necessarily the most important things he said, but the ones I work on still:

GO DOWN FOR THE RIGHT REASONS: go down for the right reason at any moment. that means, if you have a choice between presenting — no, it means if you’re going to fail, fail because YOU failed. don’t fail because you chickened out of showing yourself, thinking that maybe it would be better to show something different than yourself. Go down for the right reason.

PROGRAMMING: Contrast each piece as completely as you can with the last. Contrast style, rhythm, volume, energy, key.

PLAYING: I need to hear every note. I had just played Swack a piece which had a lot of fast arpeggios. He said what’s the point of playing all those notes if I’m not hearing each one of them? If I don’t hear them then the fastness is useless

COMPOSING: (this one I understand – I understand what he’s saying, but I never quite got whether it was just an observation, whether it was something about me he wanted me to know so I could rely and/or strengthen it, or something he wanted me to know about myself so that I could try to improve or change it). he said: when you, Deborah write a piece (and he said this laughing and shaking his head), it’s like you see the climax and then you build everything in the piece towards that.

The programming I have been able to build in to my work, but when I get stuck, it’s a help to go back to his words. Go down for the right reasons is lesson I always forget and then use at a moment of indecision to put myself back where I want to be. Playing — I’m struggling with that still, can you believe it? He told me this 25 years ago, it’s a simple issue of how I approach the music, and I’m still struggling with it. It’s like that five pounds you could lose if you just set your mind to it (so you think). But ... IS it? Is it a matter of mind (I always thought) and practice. Or is it also a matter of strength? And then ... is it really what I want? Yes, yes — in the context he was pointing it out. Arpgeggios are pointless when you can’t hear each note. Fast playing is useless and lacks strength when it’s not sure or when people are enamored of their own fastness and so miss the notes that they’re trying to use to make it fast. That’s true, completely true for me.

From Gunnar Madsen 9/28/06

My favorite things:
When he came to me in my sophomore year and said "Know anything about music theatre?". "Uh, I danced in my high school production of the Music Man...". That was apparently good enough for him. He shoved a Brecht/Eisler score into my hands, that had been smuggled out of East Germany, and told me to go meet with this director. His faith in what I could do astounded me. I was diving into the deep end, but somehow he knew that I could swim. I didn't even know him well. He just helped me fledge. That was such a great gift.

He pulled me aside one day, into the electronic music studio, he really wanted to play this tape for me. It was piano music, from old 78's, and newer stuff, all different - classical, jazz, whatever. And, eyes twinkling like crazy, he wanted me to tell him what tied them all together. I couldn't figure it out. A jazz piece came on, I'd never heard anything so great. He told me it was Thelonius Monk (playing 'Round midnight). It was like I'd finally found someone who played/heard music the way I did - Thelonius was like my long lost twin. I still couldn't figure out what his point was, though. So he told me - And he was SO excited about this! It was all composers playing their own music his delight in his listening "test" was just so fantastic. I loved him for that.

He did some "test" in class once about tempo. How a GREAT string quartet has all kinds of ebb and flow in their tempo, but that overall their tempo is actually truer and more strict than a lesser string quartet that has less room for ebb and flow and adheres to a 'strict' sense of tempo. Don't know how he proved it, but I've carried that idea in my mind ever since.

I remember talking at length about History. I love history, as did he. He postulated that history should be taught from the present BACKWARDS in time. It's the only way to make sense of it. I LOVED that idea, I got so excited talking with him about that. It's a great thing, that applies to writing, to music, to everything. The connections to the present are always there, and it puts it all in an easy to see perpsective.

Apart from that, I just loved that I could depend on him for straight talk, no bullshit, ever. He was never cruel, but always honest, so when he said he didnt' like something, and gave reasons why, it was so easy to take in. And when he said he liked something, it was easy to take in, too. No flattery. And it's not like I agreed with his tastes. I don't think we shared the same tastes all that much. It's that I took seriously what he heard. And that he took pains to go beyond his personal tastes when giving feedback. It was about the integrity of the work, and of the person doing the work. This is the big thing he taught me - being honest, owning your own tastes, but endeavoring to be open to things outside one's own tastes. In EVERYTHING - not just music or work, but in humanity. That's where he was such a rare, wonderful person to me.

Sigh....I love him.

From Stephen Pitcher - November 2006

A Few Memories of John

First would have to be John administering a test to some extremely nervous musicianship students, in which we had to take dictation from a Bartók string quartet, while he stood transfixed in the middle of the room, his eyes closed, breathing loudly and passionately and clasping his head and twisting his body and generally writhing in ecstasy at the music being played, so that we were simultaneously trying to perform this near-impossible task and glancing anxiously up at our teacher, in wonder and dismay

Several automotive escapades (including that of his New Jersey aunt who bought everything on the cheap and wound up with cut-rate insurance that covered her car for everything but burning up on a ferryboat which it did! — John had an inexhaustible fund of such tales) :

John driving the freeway from London to Huddersfield — his first major excursion in a right-hand drive, perhaps — we passengers screaming lustily and he chortling merrily each time the car bounced off the roadway’s center dividing wall

That same year the Swacks took a trip to Holland and came back with a story about being in traffic so thick that John decided to follow an opportunistic motorcyclist onto a sudden side road, only to find it was a public stairway; the cyclist laughing (with approval, one imagines) when they finally bumped their way to the bottom

Kind of a nice metaphor, that idiosyncratic detour

He conducted the music department’s big non-major survey course in typically maverick fashion, gleefully shunning sonata form — a feature he judged to have gotten far more press than it deserved — and regularly horrifying students looking for an easy A by taking them seriously enough to give them an easy F instead. (On the other hand, he always filled out an instructor evaluation form and tended to give himself B-minuses and C-pluses)

It was decades before I found out about his mathematical past. I was over to dinner at the Swackhamers’ one time and I got to talking about how irritating it was to have people blaring on all one’s life about the music ‘n’ math gene, as if that explained you somehow, but that I could allow as how the two pursuits shared a love for patterns. Patterns!, said John. It is that I left math for music over. Then he told me about being a math prodigy, one of those kids who can recite a long list of numbers backwards after hearing it once and such tricks, and how he had become more or less instantaneously disgusted with the whole phenomenon of pattern-mongering and that was why he’d switched from math to music, at which he was far less proficient, midway through his course at Black Mountain. (That he went on to compose serial music is a paradox I sure wish he were here to argue about right now)

After I dropped out of school and felt utterly defeated John gave me prophetic and consoling words and offered to work with me privately; he told me to go home and look at the Brahms Vier Ernste Gesänge and to come back “when I’d figured them out.” So I looked at them and felt utterly defeated by them, too, because the first movement was in c minor and the second was in f# minor, and what the hell was that about? So i didn’t go back, because I hadn’t figured them out, and it was a long time before I found out that the low-voice edition put out by Simrock (Brahms’s own publisher, for crying out loud) had transposed the movements differently, the idiots, and one day I wound up sitting in front of him at a concert and I turned around and explained about the Vier Ernste Gesänge and my not coming back — and he laughed THE LAUGH, of course

He advised me that a composer’s best cure for self-doubt was listening to Vivaldi

He shouted at me with actual fury, once. I had asked, with obnoxious casualness, how he felt about my not composing — we were in the music department hallway, a small, very public space — and he turned his most horrific glare upon me and more or less bellowed, If you want to know what I think, I think it’s ridiculous, that’s what I think! Fortissimo, con passione. I was terrified and grateful

I still don’t compose, much, but I don’t think that’s what actually matters any more, although I suspect he wouldn’t agree but disagreement was one of his favorite things so that’s okay. Anyhow I still hear that benignly terrifying bellow, but now I think what matters is not that I become a composer or not but that I do whatever it is that I do, and that even if it’s not exactly composing I can still use John as my inspiration

Stephen Pitcher November 2006