Steve Swayne Named Honorary Member by American Musicological Society

Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music Steve Swayne was among the scholars awarded honorary memberships by the American Musicological Society this year. The annual honor, which was announced at the society's recent annual meeting in Chicago, recognizes musicologists for "extraordinary contributions" to the society and to the field.

According to its announcement, AMS awarded Prof. Swayne the membership—its highest honor—for

"his contributions to the field of musicology, his service to the AMS, and performance career. He served as President of the AMS from 2020 to 2022 during the difficult pandemic years, leading the AMS with energy and precision. His research interests range across time and place, with interests especially in American music. He has published in many journals, including The Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and The Musical Quarterly, and has published 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), the latter winning the 2012 ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography. Swayne has also been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he held the John W. Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress in 2022. In addition to his current post at Dartmouth, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the University of California, Berkeley, and Quest University. A native of Los Angeles, California, Swayne graduated from John Muir High School and Occidental College and holds degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, Ph.D.). He is also a concert pianist with a longstanding performance career, which includes playing with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. Swayne has released a Christmas album titled Holiday Twists (1997) as well as a compilation of piano works titled Preludes by Chopin, Fauré & Gershwin (1997)."

Along with Prof. Swayne, AMS gave honorary memberships to Marta María Rodríguez Cuervo, Walter M. Frisch, Nancy Yunhwa Rao, and Ellie M. Hisama, who delivered the music department's 2024 Leonard J. Reade Distinguished Lecture on Music and Racial Justice.