Steve Swayne

ProfessorMusic Department Chair

Ph.D., M.A. University of California, Berkeley

M. Div., Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA

B.A., Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Steve Swayne teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. His scholarly articles have appeared in, among other places, The Sondheim Review, the Musical Quarterly, the Journal for the Royal Musical Association, American Music, and the Indiana Theory Review, and he currently serves as a senior editor of the forthcoming New Grove Dictionary of American Music II. 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 two more: one, on the life and music of musical theater composer William Finn; and another, on the intersections of music, neuroscience, and ethics.  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. He is an accomplished concert pianist, with 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.