1. Who are you, and what do you do here at Swat?

I’m Andrew Hauze, and my title at Swarthmore is Senior Lecturer in Music. I conduct our orchestra and wind ensemble, I teach courses on musicianship and conducting, and I supervise our student conductors in their work with our lab orchestra. I also co-direct the Fetter Chamber Music program with my colleague, Jenny Honig.

2. What kind of educational/musical experience do you have, and what was your professional journey to come to Swarthmore like?

I started playing the piano at age six, and I began to sing in local musical theater and opera productions when I was nine. It was in one of these productions, when I was about ten, that I looked down at the conductor and thought to myself, “that is the coolest job of anyone here! He can see every part in the whole orchestra laid out in front of him in the score, and he gets to coordinate it all and lead the performance.” Shortly after that I started getting really serious about my music lessons, all with the goal of becoming a conductor. I was blessed with very supportive parents and some wonderful early mentors who nourished my enthusiasm and helped me begin the lifelong process of learning orchestral scores.

We moved just before my tenth grade year, and I hadn’t been feeling very challenged in high school, so I was homeschooled for a year, and was really able to focus on piano, organ (which I’d taken up recently), and learning more about conducting. I was then fortunate enough to attend Simon’s Rock College (now called Bard College at Simon’s Rock) in place of my junior and senior years of high school, and after two wonderful years there, I transferred to Swarthmore as a junior. Though I only spent two years as a student at Swarthmore, I loved every minute of it, and I am so grateful to have had such wonderful professors, particularly in the music department. After Swarthmore, I attended the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia for three years, studying orchestral conducting, which was a dream come true. I was then fortunate enough to be hired to conduct the orchestra at Swarthmore when I was in my final year at Curtis, and I’ve been here ever since! Though my job has evolved and expanded over the years, the one constant has been conducting the orchestra, and it’s hard to believe that next year will be my 20th season with the ensemble!

3. If you could impart one piece of wisdom onto all musicians (for music or for life) what would it be?

I don’t believe that achieving perfection is possible in musical performance, and yet we’re all striving for it all the time. While striving for a goal you know you’ll never reach can be frustrating, it’s also important to have that goal in order to keep challenging yourself and to maintain your standards. For me, the vital thing to keep in balance with this sense of striving is that making music is, above all, a joyful expression of human experience. Even if the music you’re making seems to be expressing the saddest, most difficult emotions of life, for me, it’s a source of constant wonder, inspiration, and delight whenever we’re able to make music together and share the experience with others.

4. What is a really cool thing a music student has done (in or outside of college)?

Our students are always up to the most amazing things, and one fun way in which their creativity can be seen in public is in some of the senior recital programs we’ve had over the years. Some senior recitals are still fairly traditional, formal concerts in Lang Concert Hall, and these are wonderful, but we’re also seeing an increase in alternative models that celebrate the range of a given student’s musical interests and activities at the college. 

One recent example that comes to mind is the senior recital of Quincy Ponvert ’23. Quincy’s recital began in Bond Hall with Sexteto Strapatta, the tango ensemble that Quincy founded and that we supported through the Fetter Chamber Music Program. Quincy began learning the bandoneón during the Covid lockdowns, and then Quincy took the initiative to find teachers (one in Philadelphia and one in Argentina) and to assemble a tango ensemble that became a stalwart of our music department for the rest of Quincy’s time at Swarthmore. Quincy also studied in Buenos Aires for a summer, supported by the Shang-How Music Fund. 

Following an outstanding tango set, including some original compositions and bandoneón solos, we all moved outside and walked to the cherry border, where the Swarthmore Taiko Ensemble, of which Quincy was a core member, gave a magnificent performance. In addition to all of this, Quincy conducted our Lab Orchestra for several semesters and served as an assistant conductor to the college orchestra, while also minoring in Educational Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies!

5. What are your favorite orchestral pieces 1) of all time, 2) that the college has played, 3) that you want the college to play in the future?

1) That’s incredibly hard to answer, but some of the pieces that I’ve known the longest, and to which I keep returning because I find them inexhaustibly inspiring, are Beethoven’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Brahms’s Third Symphony, and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony. On the few occasions that I’ve conducted Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, I’ve come away thinking that it’s one of the greatest pieces ever, though I only got to know it much more recently.

2) I think one of the greatest works that we’ve played at Swarthmore is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony. It’s not played that frequently in the US, but I think it is a work of incredible depth. Written in the middle of World War II, it looks hard at suffering while also finding room for an incredible radiance and hope. It was the last piece we played before Covid, and I hope we’ll be able to return to it again soon!  We’ve also recently performed Grace Williams’s Penillion, which I think is a magnificent piece and I hope we’ll get to explore more of her music before long.

3) There are so many pieces that I hope we’ll be able to play in the future! Just to name a few, I’d love to program (at least some of) Holst’s The Planets, a complete symphony by Emilie Mayer (we made the premiere recording of the scherzo from her Third Symphony during Covid), some of the many orchestral works by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Jean Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony (plus my answers to part 1 of this question above!).