In honor of 50 years of coeducation at Albuquerque Academy, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of women alumni.
Jocelyn Swigger ’89 can hardly remember a moment of her childhood when the radio wasn’t on. Her dad liked to tune into the classical music of Albuquerque’s KHFM right after the morning news. “That’s just what the house sounded like,” she said.
Jocelyn ultimately made that music the soundtrack of her life, finding her way to a career as a concert pianist and professor at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College and piano instructor at Interlochen Arts Camp. The pleasure of playing the piano is so fundamental that she struggles to explain it, comparing it to eating. “I don’t really feel like I can live without it.”
She’d dreamed of a career in music since entering the Academy in ninth grade, where she arranged her free periods at the end of the day so she could travel to UNM for piano lessons and practice sessions. But she loved her other classes, too, gravitating toward teachers who challenged and sometimes outright scared her friends, including Charles Wong for precalculus and John O’Connor for English. At the Academy, she said, “I could be a nerd who wanted to do well in school” without fear of criticism. “I felt really safe.”
That didn’t protect Jocelyn from occasional crises of self-doubt. But she held on to her love for the piano, first as a student at Oberlin College and Conservatory and later earning master’s and doctoral degrees at the Eastman School of Music.
Over time, she came to appreciate the dimensions of her own abilities. Memorizing music comes more easily to her than improvising. She is also keenly aware of the ways her whole body contributes to her playing. “Put your hands in front of yourself and wiggle your fingers,” she instructed me, as a demonstration of how, when a person lowers their head until their chin is at their chest, that motion becomes harder to sustain. “A lot of the time, what I need to do to make my sound better, really, might be to lift my head up, or feel my feet on the floor, or breathe.”
Playing the piano is far more physical than many people realize, and Jocelyn has been drawn to its biggest challenges. During maternity leave after the birth of her son, she decided to learn and record Frederic Chopin’s 27 etudes. “It’s sort of the Mount Everest of the piano repertoire,” she said. “Most pianists, if I tell them that I did that, their eyes get kind of wide.” Its difficulty caught even her off-guard; she thought she’d finish in two years but ultimately took more than seven.
That was good training for her next goal – reviving the difficult compositions of a little-known female composer, Agnes Tyrrell, whom Jocelyn came across in her scholarship. “I have spent my life as a pianist in conversation with geniuses,” Jocelyn said on a podcast recorded by her high school classmates, ticking off the composers who have guided her fingertips across the keys. “And when I play this music, it absolutely feels on that level.”
Tyrrell, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic and composed prolifically throughout the 1860s and 1870s, could never have known her music would be so inspiring to another pianist 150 years later, a continent away. And that gives Jocelyn hope.
“I’m playing this music in a spirit of radical optimism because its existence proves that what is possible is way more than we imagined.”
All of Swigger’s albums are available on streaming services, and readers can follow her discoveries of Agnes Tyrrell’s music at https://jocelynswigger.com/agnesblog.
