Description

Episode Summary

An unusual outfit for an unusual man, Steve Swayne unravels his connections to knitting and jazz and divulges how an almost perfectionist learned to improvise, find his own authentic self, and become an expert on Steven Sondheim all while describing an outfit that few would dare to wear. A pattern emerges of a man who will not be contained by rigid categorization and is leading us by example into a more tolerant, musically rich world, in this episode of The Sydcast.

Syd Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, whichLinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life. 

Steve Swayne

Steve Swayne teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present day, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in The Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and The Musical Quarterly. 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 is at work on three projects: 1) the development of the chamber musical, with a focus on composer/lyricist William Finn; 2) intersections between music, neuroscience, and ethics; and 3) American composer David Diamond. He was an inaugural recipient in 2017 of the Professor John Rassias Faculty Award, given to faculty for their exceptional educational outreach to alumni. In addition to his work at Dartmouth, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; the University of California, Berkeley; and Quest University, and he is the president-elect of the American Musicological Society, the premier organization for musicologists in the English-speaking world. He is also an accomplished concert pianist.

Insights from this episode:

• Secret to how Steve can play a song after listening to it only once and how that skill is useful in many aspects of life.
• How to deal with standing out by standing out even more and using that to direct the conversation you want people to have about you.
• Benefits of living your life internally as you express yourself externally.
• How to have an authentic conversation involving race in a racially complicated world. 
• Strategies artists use to appeal to audiences to increase their success and how that can impact their perceived value as an artist.
• Benefits of working with Steven Sondheim as his biographer and becoming more of an expert on Steven Sondheim than Sondheim himself.  

Quotes from the show:

• “I am a clothes horse by nature and so I have a shoezeum at home and it’s almost exclusively in Doc Martens [shoes].” – Steve Swayne
• “There are different ways of being you rather than the ones, maybe, that you have chosen or that society has chosen for you.” – Steve Swayne
• “It’s very interesting to think about how people perceive others … from how we look and how we dress and you’re actually turning [that perception] on its head to share a lesson.” – Syd Finkelstein 
• “As humans, all of us can do what any other human in all of the human race has done, is doing, or has a dream of doing. We are all capable of doing all of it.” – Steve Swayne
• On studying east coast Jewish composers: “I learned a lot of things that I never would have thought to know.” – Steve Swayne
• On the appropriateness of telling a story of a community you are not part of: “I have a view of that community that I can only have because I’m not in it and things that might be transparent to other people, I begin to question.” – Steve Swayne
• “We are not what we present necessarily; because I’m black doesn’t mean I can only do things marked as black … we contain multitudes, all of us.” – Steve Swayne
• “I feel like we are in an era now where with this idea of having the nerve, the audacity to speak for some other group that you are not part of is really looked down upon.” – Syd Finkelstein 
• “I want to be about the business of increasing the circle of  we and decreasing the circle of they.” – Steve Swayne
• On elitism in general culture: “There’s a thing about whatever is considered popular by the masses that somehow gets denigrated … we seem to have all these rules in place for what’s acceptable, for what’s good culturally and we don’t know who wrote those rules.” – Syd Finkelstein
• On Steven Sondheim’s style of composing: “The way he conveys the life of a character through his choice of notes is very much the way certain opera composers do that type of work.” – Steve Swayne

Stay Connected:

Syd Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

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Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

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Steve Swain

Instagram: @dr._kiltmartens

Website: Dartmouth College - The Montgomery Fellows Program

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry (www.podcastlaundry.com)