Cruise the Heart of Europe

Steve Swayne, the Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present day, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. 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; winner of the 2012 ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography)—and served as the 2022 president of the American Musicological Society, the premier organization for musicologists in the English-speaking world. He held the 2020 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress and received an inaugural Professor John Rassias Faculty Award in 2017 for his exceptional educational outreach to alumni. He specializes in making classical music intelligible to non-musicians and in linking the history of music to larger political, cultural, socioeconomic, and historical trends.