Jocelyn Swigger
Home Institution: Gettysburg College
Host: Stael Rufinelli Institute of Music and Arts, Paraguay
Field: Music
Dates of Grant: 2008-2009

Two violinists came to work with me at my host institution for coaching on the Bach double violin concerto. I asked them if they had friends who played viola and cello seriously, and told them to bring them to form a string quartet.  I loved working with the string quartet of young women, aged 20-22, and I think it was probably one of my most important contributions.

The string quartet literature is almost never played in Paraguay; string players play in orchestras, but rarely as chamber musicians. We worked intensively for many hours at a time, over many coachings over a month. In our rehearsals, I emphasized ideas about musical communication, with the audience and with each other, and made sure they really thought about shaping their phrases and playing expressively.

For their final concert, they surprised me by learning a piece all by themselves to play as an encore and as a thank you to me. In that piece they learned by themselves, they did all of the things I worked so hard to help them learn to do in the rest of the concert: played expressively, looked (even smiled) at each other as they played, really performed the music. I cried. I knew, listening to them play that piece they had learned on their own, that they would continue as a group, and would continue to play well. They are continuing (I'm in touch with them via Facebook), and I hope they'll pass on to their students the ideas I helped them discover. To my knowledge, they're the only professional-level string quartet playing in Paraguay right now.

I also met and spent quite a bit of time with an older woman, a pianist who had studied with one of Paraguay's most important pianists. She invited me to her home, and she was thrilled at the way I could sight-read music. She had me sight-read lots of Paraguayan piano music (a genre not generally known in the U.S.), and she sang along with me to show me the tempos and the styles. She made me copies of lots of those pieces, and I'm going to play some of them here in the US. That music might be one of the most important things I brought back.

I think one very selfish result of my time there is a deep gratitude that I live in the first world. I'm incredibly grateful to have access to the instruments I do: I have well-maintained Steinway pianos in my office, in my home, and on my college's concert stages, and I only know of one in Paraguay. I feel a real responsibility to try to deserve those instruments and this life.

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