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IN MEMORIAM
John Meredith Swackhamer
Senior Lecturer in Music
Berkeley
1923 — 2006
John Swackhamer taught musicianship and harmony in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1956 to 1991, and collaborated in numerous music and theater performances on the Berkeley campus and in the greater Bay Area.
Born January 16, 1923 in Middletown, New Jersey, he studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1938 to 1943, and served as a medical corpsman in the Colorado ski troops of the U.S. Army during World War II. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the New School for Social Research in New York City while studying music composition with Ernst Krenek and Roger Sessions. When Sessions joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, Swackhamer followed him to the Bay Area to continue his studies. In 1956, Senior Lecturer Marjorie Petray invited him to teach in the Department of Music. He eventually became a senior lecturer and head of the department’s musicianship program, also teaching courses in harmony, analysis, score reading, and music history until his retirement in 1991. He died on September 18, 2006.
Swackhamer’s talents across the spectrum of the arts gained the attention and respect of his colleagues and students throughout the campus. The Department of Dramatic Arts sought him out as a composer, music consultant, and director for countless productions. In a production with former Professor Jean Bernard Bucky, he scored Hans Eisler’s stage music to Bertold Brecht’s The Measures Taken. He insisted that the production include students from both the Department of Music and that of dramatic arts, and the event inaugurated a series of interdepartmental efforts stretching over many years. Other memorable performances for which he composed music include King Lear, Hamlet, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Phaedra, Horatius, and The Misanthrope. He was particularly fond of the works of Brecht and Melville, and over the course of his life endeavored to complete an opera on Melville’s Confidence Man. John’s knowledge of the theater served the Department of Music in good stead: he advised students interested in composing music for the theater and himself mounted a production of Stravinsky’s chamber opera Mavra. (Recordings of his music for campus performances may be found in the UC Berkeley Department of Music archives).
Swackhamer infused a sense of humor in his collaborations. His wife Kate recalled one such occasion: the UC Symphony under its conductor Michael Senturia had performed Ravel’s “fiendish and fiendishly difficult” composition La Valse not particularly well. John obtained the tape and used portions of it for a production of Schnitzler’s Reigen by the Department of Dramatic Arts, in which the recorded rendition, warts and all, formed an integral part of the stage action. He maintained a close relationship with Michael Senturia, and his championing of Roger Sessions’ cantata When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (a commission in honor of the University’s centennial) led directly to its renowned world premiere conducted on the UC campus by Senturia in 1971.
He also collaborated in artistic projects beyond the campus environs. He composed music for the Berkeley Repertory Theater’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost and for A.C.T.’s production of Dos Passos’s USA. He also composed music for Aristophanes’ The Women Take Power (with his wife, actress Kathryn Trask, directing the production) and for Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, performed in Berkeley, Walnut Creek, and San Francisco. A champion of new music, he was a founding member of the Bay Area new music ensemble, Earplay, which began as a community forum for the performance of UC graduate student compositions. His chamber and orchestral works were performed by various ensembles locally and nationally.
Swackhamer saw no boundaries between the campus and the outside world, no division between artistic endeavors and social causes. He was a supporter of the Free Speech Movement. He was president of the board of directors of the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California, which provides instruction to low income children of the East Bay. He also taught in the UC Young Musicians Program. In the 1980s, he helped to organize benefit concerts for Musicians Against Nuclear Arms. Among these was a concert at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall that involved conductors George Cleve, Ted Flath, Kent Nagano, and Edo de Waart. He remained an activist in the Gray Panthers throughout his retirement years.
Among his many talents and passions, perhaps the greatest was teaching. “Jack Swack” left an indelible impression on his many students who pursued careers and avocations in music in varied ways. Two of his Grammy Award-nominated students wrote fond reminiscences on their websites at the time of his memorial. Deborah Henson-Conant recalled that he advised her to “go down for the right reason at any moment.” He would say: “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.” She further added, “Swack’s challenges to me are as present in my life today as when he first gave them. I’m not done learning from Swack. And oddly, I never had a single class with him.” Gunnar Madsen, composer/film-maker and founding member of The Bobs, wrote, “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.”
Endearing to his colleagues and students were his hearty laugh, the twinkle in his eye, his uncompromising honesty, his appetite for heated discussion, and his total lack of animus. Fellow musicianship teacher Elizabeth Davidson writes, “All of us who worked with John (‘under’ him wasn’t how it felt) remember his unfailing support, his enthusiastic mentoring, and how he nurtured the tradition of working together that had always been a part of teaching in the musicianship program. A composer, he had keen perceptions on hearing new works, especially those by colleagues in the department and in the musical community outside. Interested in many different facets of musical life in the department, he shared his time and ideas generously.”
John engaged actively in the lives of his seven children: three from his marriage to his first wife Eleanor; three the children of Kathryn from her former marriage; and a daughter born to Kathryn and John. Together with his children, he took part in the Orinda 4-H Club, in scouting, etc. He took an interest in issues of education, environmental causes and in diverse community affairs that sprang from his close involvement with his family.
Christy Dana
Marika Kuzma
Karen Rosenak
Michael Senturia