Susan Swaney's musical connections

Susan Swaney in high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, taking a master class with Lorin Hollander (who is also a close friend of Kenneth Kiesler, her son’s conducting teacher at the University of Michigan)

Voces Novae’s upcoming concert, "Six Degrees of Separation," explores musical and other connections between people. Join us on November 12 at 5pm at the Bloomington Unitarian Universalist Church! Add to calendar

Board member Brian O’Donnell, Indiana University Professor Emeritus of Psychological and Brain Sciences, recently interviewed music director Susan Swaney about her own musical connections.

Two decades ago, theater director Peter Sellars gave advice in a lecture at Indiana University: “If you want to get something done pick up the phone. You know somebody who knows somebody.”

“It was empowering to hear this,” says Susan Swaney, who has taken this advice to heart. Her own musical connections span great distances of time and space. In high school, she studied piano with Julian Bern, a refugee from Lithuania, who had studied with French pianist Alfred Cortot, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov from Russia, and French composer Nadia Boulanger.

Her musical network expanded as she changed her focus from piano to violin to voice to conducting, including her voice teacher Vera Scammon, colleague Ray Fellman, and conducting teachers Thomas Dunn, Jan Harrington, Mary Goetze, Paul Hillier, Robert Porco, and Carmen Tellez.

She herself became a teacher, director, and mentor for thousands of students and performers, and finds now that she has students of students under her wing. Her collaborative connections radiate through many groups and settings, encompassing Voces Novae, the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington, musical theater students, theater productions, and two reading groups. And she’s still making phone calls.

A more recent photo of Susan Swaney conducting Voces Novae.