Music, nature and inspiration with composer Jan Swafford

Welcome to the latest episode of Harmonious World, where I interview musicians about how their music helps make the world more harmonious.

I had the opportunity to interview Maestro Swafford in person and then attend a recording of his tone poem Late Autumn-First Snow at Abbey Road. The orchestra that day was formed from members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the marvellous Michael Shapiro. Our conversation includes some of Jan’s thoughts behind the composition, including the inclusion of the Robert Frost poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 

Thanks to Jan for allowing me to play extracts from Midsummer and River alongside our conversation. Jan gave us an insight into how he comes up with ideas for his music and their titles.

Thank you for listening to Harmonious World. Please rate, review and share: click on the link and subscribe to support the show.

Don't forget the Quincy Jones quote that sums up why I do this: "Imagine what a harmonious world it would be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing."

Transcript

Hilary 0:16

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Harmonious World. My name is Hilary Seabrook. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, then I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with composer Jan Swafford. I always speak to interesting people, and Jan is no exception. I was lucky enough to be able to chat with him in person in London when he was last over. And I also went to Abbey Road Studio 2 to see a recording of his music under the baton of Michael Shapiro and with members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. That was a wonderful experience, and it was great to chat with Jan. What you're listening to now is an extract from his Midsummer variations. And I hope you enjoy listening in to my conversation with Jan Swofford.

Jan 2:09

Well, it's great to be part of the tradition, Hillary. You have quite a tradition.

Hilary 2:15

Well, yes, and um we've sort of come uh on a tangent via Michael Shapiro, and of course on Friday Michael is going to be conducting your the recording of your work at Abbey Road.

Jan 2:31

Yes, that's um it was it was Michael's idea to begin with, and uh he was visiting me one day, we're friends, and he just came downstairs one morning and said, You know, do you want to record with the Royal Philharmonic? I know them pretty well.

Hilary 2:46

Yeah.

Jan 2:47

And I found out about Abbey Road later.

Hilary 2:49

Right, oh right. But you know about Abbey Road.

Jan 2:51

Oh, I know very well about Abbey Road.

Hilary 2:53

Yeah.

Jan 2:53

The big question is, do I go to that intersection and get my picture taken like thousands of other people?

Hilary 2:59

There will always be lots of people having their photo taken there. The best photos, though, I have to say, are the ones taken on the steps of Abbey Road. Because because to get in there you have to go through the gates, so it's only people who actually record, so it would be quite nice. Perhaps we can get one of you, me, and Michael on the steps.

Jan 3:17

I would be delighted, especially if I don't have a chance to get to that intersection.

Hilary 3:22

Yeah, well, it is that um the the zebra crossing, as it's called, is right opposite, so you will see it, you can't avoid it, and there will be lots and lots of tourists when you arrive who are who are posing on that.

Jan 3:37

So well, my friends have been hounding me about this. I mean, I've I said, Well, I don't know if I'll get there.

Hilary 3:42

No, you have to. Oh, you will, you'll definitely be there. So fantastic. Um, so tell me first of all about the piece that is being performed on Friday.

Jan 3:53

There are two of them. Uh, one is called Late Autumn-First Snow for Full Orchestra, and the other is called River for String Orchestra. And these are my two latest pieces after taking, mostly taking about a 20-year vacation from composing to write books.

Hilary 4:13

Well, you are a very world-renowned, well-respected writer of biographies of all sorts of people. You've done Mozart and Bach, is that right?

Jan 4:23

No, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Charles Ives.

Hilary 4:28

Right, and in fact, I have, I discovered, let me just print it out, on my sh on my shelf, oh, I have the new guide to classical music.

Jan 4:40

Which is the British version of the vintage guide to classical music.

Hilary 4:43

Right, and there is a lovely photo in here. Um, there's a there's one that I found earlier of um Ives. Um, but I love this photo of John Cage that you found, where you you say something about him about to break into a um about to break into his famous laugh.

Jan 5:03

Well, yes, that was that was the point. A friend of mine just saw Cage Live and spent 10 minutes describing his life to me.

Hilary 5:12

Yeah, very good, very good. But that's a that's a really interesting, as you can see, I've got a very well-thumbed copy of it that I then discovered. I I I'd I'd bought it because I did a music degree, you know, and I I'd bought it to to sort of further my uh further my understanding of classical music, and um it was only recently that I looked at it and went, Oh, I'm interviewing him. So that's brilliant. So, yeah, so you've got these two aspects. You've got the composition and you've got the writing and the the sort of the theory, if you like, of of of music, and the composition side is is is something that you've sort of come back to, is that right?

Jan 5:53

Well, I set out in life early on to write music and teach music, and that's it.

Hilary 5:58

Right.

Jan 5:59

And uh, but I'm not a very academically, my personality apparently is not very academic. So I seem to be weird in the academy a little bit. So my teaching jobs have been a bit, you know, scrappy, is one way that I'd put it. Though I ended teaching 10 years in a conservatory. So at one point I was actually hired to write this book you have of mine, uh, The New Guide or the Vintage Guide, and uh that went well. And the editor said, look, pick a composer, any composer, and we'll hire you to write a book about him. And I said, Well, I've said this in interviews many times. I don't know, I guess I don't know, I think there's been a great biography of Brahms. So they said, okay. And I stumbled into it and immediately was in sort of a morass. I was like a thicket of thorns. I suddenly realized why there had not been a very vivid biography of Brahms because he covered things up. He was a very private person, he burned a lot of letters. Uh he really did not want people mucking around in his life very much. Um I wrote that book in a kind of despair because I said, you can't do it, it can't be done. And I but I finally realized I was reading Galleys, the first you know, test printing of the book, on the Ulster in Hamburg. I was there to give a talk, and I've said, wait a minute, I really did it.

Hilary 7:34

One of the things obviously I I haven't actually read your the biographies, but I've read this, and your writing style is very easygoing. It's it's a very it's a very conversational um way of teaching it. You're not you you're not didactic and you know, in terms of sort of you when you state something you're you're kind of opening it up to to not to debate so much, but but just to kind of um you know this is something that I've found out, which I think Well that's just how I write.

Jan 8:06

Meanwhile, I one of my favorite quotes is the physicist Feynman. What is his first name? Yeah, Richard. Richard Feynman, who said if you can't explain something simply, you don't really understand it.

Hilary 8:18

Yeah.

Jan 8:18

My my goal has been to explain music and musicians simply, and I've got a certain amount of talent as a writer, so that's you know, I uh when I was in the eighth grade, I expected to be a writer. Uh and I actually showed early talent as a writer. What I didn't have was taste, which is something you get later.

Hilary 8:41

Yeah, yes, absolutely. It's really interesting because actually you are you are uh highly um you you know much more significantly, but you are that this is what I do. I write and I I write about music and I understand music and um I don't compose um but but I I perform a little and um you know so so I think that the the whole that intersection between words literature and music I think is very very interesting.

Jan 9:12

Well it's a partly a matter of being creative. Um my mother was a high school English teacher whose whole act as a teacher was built around teaching her students to be creative. So she had them writing poems and short stories rather than essays. Well, she had them writing essays too, and she would mark the grammar mistakes in their poems and essays. Uh so I think uh, and she started the school literary magazine, so the the artiest students in high school were always around the house when I was growing up. And I think I was sort of doomed to be a creative type of some sort or other, and that happened to come out in music. Um, and I feel that uh composing is my creativity. Composing is that is the central part of me, and by in a way that biography isn't. I don't look at biography as a creative endeavor, I look at it as a kind of higher journalism, higher only because you you have more time to do it, but it's just reporting the facts, really.

Hilary 10:15

Yes.

Jan 10:16

And I'm kind of against interpretation as a biographer. I don't, as I've said before, I don't think anybody lives their lives to be interpreted by somebody else for their own benefit.

Hilary 10:29

No, no. And and also it's not for us to do that, is it? I don't know.

Jan 10:34

Well, it is usually if you're a biographer, but I don't. Because people write biographies to make money and to get tenure and to you know get jobs, and I d I don't write them for that reason, and I never got paid very well for them either. Well, no. So, um, but meanwhile, I at a certain point I realized I don't I'm done. I don't I've written four huge books about composers, and uh a friend wants a piece from me, an orchestra piece. James Sinclair conducts works to New England, and I said that's that's my ticket to get back in, and now I can f into what I into my creativity, and now I can find out what I learned from Beethoven, Brahms, and Ives, and and apply and see how it applies in my own work. And I've learned a great deal, needless to say, especially from Beethoven.

Hilary 11:29

Yeah, well, yes. There's a lot to learn, isn't there?

Jan 11:33

Well, because Beethoven left his sketches. So you could with Beethoven and with unlike almost all of the composers, you can really see the process of creating a work from the beginning to the end and realize how Yates had a had a had a ring that had on it a what was it, a butterfly and something else. And the w the the something else was a straight line and the butterfly, which is reason, and the butterfly was the flittering path of inspiration.

Hilary 12:10

Wow.

Jan 12:11

And I think with Beethoven you learn that you see the flittering on the page in his sketches, and you realize that's okay.

Hilary 12:20

Yes, I went to his house actually last summer in um just outside Vienna, and what was interesting about that was the emphasis on the fact that he used to go take long walks all the time. Yes. And and I think there's an element of that, that sort of getting close to nature in order to be able to come back and write.

Jan 12:40

Yes. Well, nature was his his religion in a way. He was by the way, the other the other thing on Yeats's ring I just remembered was the hawk. So we had a the hawk, the straight line of the hawk, and the flittering path of the butterfly. Those were his two, to him, two poles of life and creativity in a way. But clearly he preferred the butterfly.

Hilary 13:03

Yeah, but yes.

Jan 13:05

Nature was Beethoven's um religion in a way, but this was a very enlightenment, you know, attitude that uh scripture as as as um Kant said, you know, scripture, nothing can be true. We we we can believe in God, but we cannot understand God. And we cannot accept scripture as the word of God because that's something created by people. And for a lot of Enlightenment people, including Beethoven, nature was the true scripture. So the you know, the Sixth Symphony, the pastoral of Beethoven, is usually perceived as a kind of pleasant pastoral piece. Well, it is, but it's also a religious piece because it's his view of of the reality of God and nature. And he was Beethoven was not a practicing Catholic, he was not a churchgoer. And as I always said, he wanted to deal with God man to man. Yes. Not through priests and not through the church. And I don't think he was very interested in Christ, he was interested in God.

Hilary 14:08

Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? It's a fascinating, I think that that connection between nature and a spirituality, however, wherever that puts you. Um but I I I I think it is interesting how many people who would say they're you know they don't believe in God or whatever, but are close to nature. It's like, well, how can you how can you do that?

Jan 14:32

Because you know, you're almost duplicating a conversation I had, one of the great conversations in my life, uh, with my friend, the Reverend Norm Bendroth. We were on a cliff in Grand Canyon and talking about Greek drama and all kinds of wonderful things. And he said, How can you look at all this and not feel the presence of something divine? And I said, What I see is something beyond understanding, it's it's mystery. But whatever it is, it's the truth.

Hilary 15:00

Yeah.

Jan 15:01

And it's a truth eternally beyond our comprehension, but um one that we can sense and and kind of glory in.

Hilary 15:11

Yes. We interestingly, we as we were as we were preparing for this interview, we were talking about Jane Ira Bloom, who you know from Yale and who I've interviewed three times, and um she's got a fascination with the stars, and and um a lot of her work is sort of based around she's got a she's got a star named after her because there was a guy who was listening to her album from about two or three years ago, and he was listening to it while when he discovered this whatever it is. And I don't know the difference between stars and planets and whatever that, you know, lots of other things for astral things, but um, yeah, it's really interesting how um you know that's sort of an extension of the of the you know, sitting, it's almost an extension of sitting on a patch of grass and looking at the fact that every blade of grass is different and then looking at the sky and seeing that every star is different.

Jan 16:08

And they're the same ultimately the same.

Hilary 16:10

Exactly.

Jan 16:11

The small and the and the large are the same.

Hilary 16:13

Yeah.

Jan 16:14

Well, it was it Krishna said in the Hindu in the religion, people search for me in the things they love best, and in those things I reveal myself to them. Um and I think an artistic inspiration, it doesn't really matter so much where you find it, but you f you find it, and I found it much of the time in nature in my work, you know. I late autumn, my two pieces are late autumn and and river, and I've written a landscape piece called Landscape with Traveller and um From the Shadow of the Mountain and so forth.

Hilary 16:51

Um So what what can I expect to hear when I go when I turn up at Abbey Road on um on Friday afternoon? What can I expect to hear? How where where is your music so it's orchestral?

Jan 17:05

Well, late autumn dash first snow. I I started I in early 70s when I was at Yale actually, I wrote this idea. I wrote a piece for a friend of mine to play with St. Louis Symphony, and it had begun with two minutes of all 12 notes sounding at the same time in this shifting chord that I thought was sounded oddly like tonal chord changes. But I always said that I really, and that piece was played in Europe at the Galliamas Festival. I always said I didn't really know what to do with that material, and I want to come back to it and make it a string piece. So it took about 40 years, and I started working on it. This is this is River, um, and I wrote into it a bit, and a couple of friends of mine, including Paul Winter, the Paul Winter consort, and a friend of mine, Adam Golke, who's playing some of my music. And both of them said something interesting about the beginning. It was that same 12-note chord, massive thing and surging around in strings. And Adam pointed at measure 13 and said, This is where it goes south. Um, and I realized I had to cut it down, and so that chord is still there, but it's move it's much simpler, it's moving around. And meanwhile, I said this reminds me of a river. This music has a flow because it's using a very unusual technique in which everybody's playing the same arpeggio but up to ten speeds at the same time.

Hilary 18:38

Wow.

Jan 18:39

Um, and it creates a texture like nothing you've ever heard before, but it has a remarkable sense of flow. And I said, This reminds me of a river. And particularly one day I was with Adam and another friend on the on a river near my house in a beautiful July day, and I just went with that image and it and it began to control the feeling of the piece as well as the technique. So I was very much involved with the technique. What do I do with this idea called heterophony of superimposed tempos? But also, how do I convey what you feel looking at a river on a beautiful day in summer? Um, and I think in this piece I got closer to nature than I ever have in my pieces. So there's that. And I was not doing a moment-by-moment portrait of the river, but I did say at one point, well, there really do have to be some rapids. So there are, and I played a computer, you know, a software mock-up of this piece for a composer, a friend of mine. He said, You know, I once nearly drowned in a canoeing accident, and it sounded exactly like that.

Hilary 19:51

Wow.

Jan 19:51

Which I think is a compliment.

Hilary 19:54

Yeah. So because when you when you talk about a river, a river isn't just one thing, it's not just water, you know, there's things in it, and that sort of thing. Which is I I'm I'm sort of guessing what I'm gonna hear that that some there are all those different things that move, you know, heavier things move slower and lighter things move faster along the top, and that sort of thing.

Jan 20:17

That might be a description of my piece, actually.

Hilary 20:19

We'll see.

Jan 20:20

But it ends with after the rapids, you know. R I've been in rapid, not very serious, but rapids, and uh they end very quickly. And I've looked at rapids a lot in Grand Canyon. Uh so I decided it was time for some bird calls. So I I took down some bird calls from my yard and uh ended the peace with them. Um when the river returns to being placid. So there's that, and then there's late autumn, and I was again, I I when I when I write pieces about nature, they actually I don't usually start with the image of the natural image. I usually start with a purely musical idea. I have one piece called Midsummer Variations for piano quintet that I I just wrote it, and I said, What am I gonna call this? Wait a minute. It's midsummer, I'm living in the country. I just read a friend of mine's book based on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. This piece is about Midsummer, I just didn't know it. Um so it that became Midsummer Variations. Uh late autumn I was working with some ideas, writing the first few pages, uh, and thought, you know, this reminds me of late autumn in New England when the leaves are gone and there's this kind of beautiful grey gloom in the woods and a certain melancholy. So I started going with that image and that began to control the the expression of the piece, the feelings in it. Uh and again I was working with very particular material. A certain scale, certain chords. And then I thought, gee, wouldn't it be nice if I ended this piece with a setting of the Robert Frost poem Stopping by Woods in a Snowy Evening? It was just a very famous poem. Yes. And that poem everybody thinks is a kind of charming, folksy poem, but it's not. It's about despair. It's about the call of darkness and the kind of painful pulling back from darkness. So I was telling a friend about that, and she said, it doesn't snow in autumn. And I said, yes, it does in New England. And that's when I added the first snow to the title. So it's late autumn-first snow. But the first snow also implies the kind of sense of the of winter coming, which is part of the melancholy, the kind of gentle melancholy of this piece. So basically that was an emotional and visual image that guided me. So I had the technical material, the chords, the scale, and then I had that, and then I had something you learned from Beethoven. It's good to have the end when you're in the middle, because you know what you're aiming for. And I began to say, all right, I'm aiming for the setting of this poem, which I want to be the most beautiful and touching melody I know how to write. And I think I'm a good melodist. So that's how that piece went. That's about 20 minutes, River's about nine minutes. And the orchestra is going to have to learn them both in a day.

Hilary 23:42

I tell you what, the RPO are amazing. I've seen them several times. And there's always a, there's those those sort of first few minutes of kind of sight reading. I mean, they're incredible sight readers anyway, but then there is a kind of, did you mean this to be an A-flat, or did you, you know, should that be, you know, whatever, faster or slower, or you know, whatever, where do we where do we slow down? Where where are the dynamics, for instance, and that sort of thing?

Jan 24:10

Well, there's also among good musicians an understanding of what this is about, what it feels like. You know, they play through it and they're just kind of finding the notes, and then they uh you see musicians, really good musicians, with a sort of aha.

Hilary 24:24

Yeah.

Jan 24:24

I get what this is about. I mean, expressively as well as technically.

Hilary 24:29

Yes.

Jan 24:29

Um, and that that guides them. I remember the first time it happened to me I had a stream, a duo for violin and cello, and I showed up for the first rehearsal, expecting to have to explain everything. Well, you know, this should be really be a really pretty intense here. And I didn't have to explain anything, they just got it.

Hilary 24:48

And and you're working with, you know, one of the top orchestras, certainly in the UK, if not the world. You're working with Michael, who's an incredibly adept conductor and sort of explaining to people what what where where you're where he is going, where you are going. And of course, the technical recording guys at Abbey Road are just the best. So yeah.

Jan 25:12

That's all part of the excitement. I've certainly never had anything like it before. It's this is this is my return to my muse in a b in a big way. Well, that's fantastic. And I hope to work with them again and to put out some of my chamber music in the next couple of years.

Hilary 25:28

Brilliant. Is the Robert Frost poem going to be read?

Jan 25:32

No, it's sung at the end. Basically, I should explain this. There's a mezzo.

Hilary 25:39

Right.

Jan 25:40

And I said, Well, uh, when I thought of the idea of the poem, by the way, I didn't finish explaining the deal with the poem. I said, I was saying, wouldn't it be nice to end with the Frost poem? But of course I can't do that because you never get permission from the Frost estate. This was well known to composers. But I looked it up and it just come into public domain. So I could do it. So I said at the end of a mezzo, stand up and sing the poem. And Michael listened to the piece and he really liked it, but he said, look, you've got to give the mezzo more to do. Meanwhile, it was the piece was premiered by a sort of expanded chamber orchestra, but it's really a full orchestra piece, so I did it another version. So I basically worked the mezzo in uh wordlessly as an as an instrument uh here and there earlier in the piece, and then she sings the song at the end. But you're not going to hear it.

Hilary 26:30

Oh, oh, because that's being recorded another time.

Jan 26:32

We're putting it in later.

Hilary 26:33

Oh, okay. That's a that's a shame.

Jan 26:34

Well, I should wait to hear the final the final version, so um, yeah, it'll it will it'll mainly make a difference at the end where we have to tell the orchestra you're playing a company now.

Hilary 26:45

Yeah, yeah. Um one of the things that I found really interesting is when I started Harmonious World, it was I had a very clear, I had a you know, file on my computer that had classical stuff in it, and I had a file on my computer that had jazz stuff in it. And now I don't bother, now they all go in the same one because you when you were composing were improvising because you know the comp the composition process is improvising. You're not you know, you're not expecting people to improvise in Abbey Road, but the the the the there's a such a fine line, especially in contemporary classical music, I think, um, between contemporary classical and contemporary jazz, um, in terms of improvisation.

Jan 27:34

You mean they overlap.

Hilary 27:36

They do overlap, yeah.

Jan 27:37

I'm sure that's true. I mean, I have to go and listen to Jane now, which I haven't for a while, Jane Irbly. Uh but uh in the first place, I think a work of a classical piece should unfold as sounding as if it were an improvisation, with that kind of sense of flow and freedom.

Hilary 27:57

Yeah.

Jan 27:58

Um, and that's why Mozart is in terms of continuity and flow is probably the greatest of all, because he he had a phenomenal memory. He was an improviser. But Beethoven improvisation was Beethoven's creative engine as well. I'm a terrible piano player and I can't sit down and improvise elaborately, but I'm still improvising the material. But the the trick, the difficulty is to have your music, even if it takes as late autumn did, a year to write, to have it unfold as naturally and to flow as well as an improvisation. And that is one of the most difficult things to do. It's why, to me, writing biography is very hard, but it's nothing compared to writing music, which is so vague and it's so uh having to make something happen through these forests of notes is just one of the most difficult things on earth, and not that many people have been that great at it. No, let's face it, though why people like Mozart and Beethoven are supreme is because they were good at that. And to look at Beethoven's sketches where you see them in the early early stages, two things about Beethoven in the early stages. A, he already had an idea immediately. As soon as he began working in a piece, he was working toward a conception. And you can see the conception in the earliest sketches. And for example, the first movement of the roacca, you see that he wanted something that was searching and tumultuous and never settled down. That was the conception, but he didn't know how to get there. So then you see him floundering around in the sketches, and the and but floundering around toward a concept that's already in his head. And then gradually they began to they begin to coalesce and coalesce. And um though the you know Notabum, the great student of Beethoven sketches, thought it was a sort of straight line, hawk-like process from beginning to perfection. It was no such thing. He was still sometimes sketching on the final copies.

Hilary 30:11

So more of the butterfly than the hawk.

Jan 30:13

More butterfly than hawk.

Hilary 30:15

That's brilliant. I will always remember that. That's fantastic.

Jan 30:18

That's great. Though it's also true contrary, everybody thinks Beethoven's sketches all look like, I mean, manuscripts all look like battlefields because when you're writing a book about Beethoven and you want to copy an example of his manuscript, you find the the sloppiest and craziest one you can find. And the fact is most of his final manuscripts are perfectly clear. And uh I looked at the first one I really examined carefully was the the Wallstein piano sonata. And that is there's almost no mess on that at all. The biggest, the biggest scratch out was once when he copied one measure twice, one page to the next. And you can almost hear him swearing as he scratched it out, but that was the biggest blotch in the manuscript.

Hilary 31:05

Wow.

Jan 31:06

Um but sometimes when he got in trouble, they do look like a battlefield. Same with Charles Ives. Everybody assumes that he was random and scratchy, and that's because when you the the examples of his manuscript are all stuff he j he sketched at the piano, and they're very rough, but his final manuscripts he had a very clear hand, actually. But then he would go back and mess with them, and that creates eternal headaches or others. Yeah, that's a whole different issue.

Hilary 31:34

Yeah. But you've had all of that to learn from in your own in your own creativity now, which is amazing.

Jan 31:40

But Beethoven was the most valuable because of the sketches. It gives you more courage, it really does. To be bad than to be wrong. A lot of Beethoven's sketches are just bad. But he, you know, there's the I think it's the second theme of the second movement of the Fifth Symphony. The he had a a version of the second theme that was just blah. It used the motifs he was working with, and you see the logic of it. It's just not very good, but he was just there to hold his place until he thought of something better, and then he went back and made it good.

Hilary 32:14

Yeah.

Jan 32:14

And that is the kind of courage you need to know that you can make it better if you're lucky.

Hilary 32:21

How absolutely fantastic.

Jan 32:23

Yeah.

Hilary 32:24

Oh, honestly, Jan, it's been such a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Jan 32:28

Thank you. It's it's always fun to do this, and I appreciate being part of your your roster.

Hilary 33:00

This is River, which Jan and I spoke about in our conversation. This is actually an earlier recording. This is not the recording from the RPO last week. That will follow. But thank you for listening to my conversation with Jan Swafford. If you've enjoyed listening, please do share, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help. I'm so lucky to have listeners in 158 countries and more than 3,000 cities now. And knowing that I'm bringing music to people who might otherwise never have heard of these composers or performers is just such an honour. So thank you for joining me once more for Harmonious World. Enjoy listening to an extract from the opening of River by Jan Swafford, and I will see you soon.