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Joseph Swensen | |
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| Born | 1960 |
| Era | Contemporary |
Joseph Swensen is a conductor, violinist, and composer. He is winner of awards, including the Leventritt Foundation Sponsorship Award and the Avery Fisher Career Award. In 2000, Swensen was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews, Scotland.[1] In 2014, he gave a TedX talk with the title “Habitats for Music and the Sound of Math” about music education and the developing brain, at the New York Institute of Technology.
Joseph Swensen was born in 1960 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and grew up in Spring Valley, New York, Pearl River, New York and Harlem, New York City.[2] His mother, Kikue Swenson was Japanese-American and has played and taught piano for most of her life. His father is Norwegian-American. He studied music at the Juilliard School, where his teachers included Dorothy DeLay.[3]
Until his thirties, Swensen's career was as a violin soloist. He performed in major cultural centres, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. During his early career recording with BMG Classics,[4][5] he recorded the major violin concerto repertoire with conductors such as André Previn.[6] More recently, he has recorded as soloist with The Scottish Chamber Orchestra.[7] He now combines a career as soloist and chamber musician with that of conducting.[8][9]
Swensen currently holds the post of Conductor Emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra,[10] where he was Principal Conductor from 1996-2005 during which time Swensen and the orchestra followed a regular concert schedule in Scotland[11] and toured extensively in the UK,[12] Europe, US, and the Far East. They also performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, Tanglewood and Ravinia Festivals, the BBC Proms, the Barbican, and the Concertgebouw, and recorded for Linn Records.[13] From 2006 - 2011, he was music director with Malmő Opera and is guest conductor for a number of UK,[14] European[15] and American orchestras.[16] Succeeding Paul Daniel, Joseph Swensen was appointed musical director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine (ONBA) in May 2023 as of the 2024-2025 season.[17]
Joseph Swensen joined IU in 2013. He is appointed Starling Professor of Music (violin) at Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music in 2014.[18] Along with his wife, Victoria Swensen, he founded Habitat4Music, a non-profit organization devoted to establishing participatory music education programmes for children in musically under-served areas worldwide.[19] At the Habitat4Music Centre in Vermont Swensen held "Total Immersion" courses in important composers for professional musicians and conductors.[20]