Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Swayze.
Hi Daniel, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I’ve always loved house concerts and intimate performances. As a teen, I’d occasionally play the piano for groups of friends at my family home in Portland, OR. Eventually, I started making rounds to retirement centers; it was a great way to experience performing. I liked being able to talk with the audience and interact with them. Through college, I kept up the habit of finding places in the community to organize small recitals and chamber music concerts. When I moved to Austin for my Masters in piano at UT, I was asked to accompany the Austin Saengerrunde, Austin’s oldest music organization. They’re a traditional German singing society with a men’s choir and a women’s choir; once a week, they get together, grab a mug of beer, and sing songs in German. Some of it is what you’d expect to hear at an Oktoberfest; oom-pa folksongs and the like. But some of it is more sophisticated–Schubert, Mozart, Brahms, etc. I loved their down-to-earth way of enjoying music and the community-building element of it, and I wanted to bring that vibe to classical concerts. I proposed a house concert to one of the active members of the community, a fellow named Bart Goddard. He ended up escalating the idea with the rest of the club. The next thing I knew, they bought a nice grand piano, made acoustic upgrades to their upper room at Saengerrunde Hall downtown, and backed me financially to organize a public concert of German music.
With their support, I organized the first concert with a couple of colleagues from UT, a vocalist, and a cellist, featuring what we call the Three B’s in classical music but with a twist; Bach, Brahms, and Beerthoven. As is common in Saengerrunde events, we included free beer and snacks for everyone who attended, made some more dad jokes, and sang Ein Prosit a time or two–it was a hit. We had 65 people at that first concert, and many of them asked me by the end, “When is the next one?” So the Beerthoven Concert Series was born. By the second season, after five or six similar programs, It was whispered to me by a few club members that I didn’t have only to feature German music, and they encouraged me to seek financial backing from elsewhere in the community. If it was not to be a program primarily by and for Germans, then I had to decide what its broader identity would be, so Beerthoven joined the Austin Creative Alliance as one of its Sponsored Projects and marketed it more broadly as a down-to-earth chamber music series. It’s called chamber music because, in the old days, this music mainly happened in living rooms and at intimate gatherings; Mozart’s string quartets, Beethoven’s piano trios, and Schubert’s song cycles were all mostly played among friends for fun. But it’s a different vibe than what many classical audiences are used to today. I’ve enjoyed presenting events that feel new and fresh while, in a way, they’re a modern framing of a period performance practice, more similar in many respects to how the music was originally presented.
It’s also become an outlet for my love for dad jokes and puns; many of our programs have punny names like He-Brews or Czechs Mix or–in the case of our upcoming May 2023 program–The Grain in Spain. The puns help people feel comfortable and let their guard down; if we don’t take ourselves too seriously, they feel more open to having genuine and often profound responses to the music. Sometimes audience members will vocally respond to things performers say while introducing a piece, and they’ll have a back-and-forth. Sometimes the personal stories of performers or other collaborators are so heartwarming they bring people to tears; I recall our recent Ukrainian concert Viva Lviv, in which we heard directly from people who had fled the war. We got to let them know they’re welcome here in Austin by singing some Ukrainian songs for and with them. So it’s not all dad jokes. In the fall of 2018, after some encouragement from mentors to consider adding an educational component to our programming, we rolled out a group piano class. We called it Craft Piano, adult piano classes with an adult beverage. The first several classes occurred in local breweries, such as our beer sponsor Lazarus Brewing. To produce it, we had to build a mobile piano lab; a few of our team members got their heads together to design a custom rack for carrying half a dozen piano keyboards at a time with all the accessories; with two of these racks and a trailer, we were able to set up a class of a dozen pianos anywhere with an outlet in about 30 minutes. We got national attention, including an article from Food and Wine magazine.
We were doubling in size year after year leading up to the pandemic; Craft Piano was offering classes multiple days a week, and rather than offering bigger performances in our Concert Series, we offered more small ones, giving two performances of each program and eventually three, moving into living rooms around the city. We were set up to give fifteen performances in 2020 but had to pause much of our programming.
We’ve focused almost entirely on supporting local artists, and we found that many of them were producing a treasure-trove of streamed events early on in the pandemic, so for some time, we decided to be one of their distributors via a weekly newsletter we called Streams On Tap. We did this for a few months before working out ways to produce outdoor concerts safely; we had a brass quintet outdoors in November 2020 at Neill-Cochran House Museum, a streamed Christmas concert the following month, and a couple of similar performances in 2021 that were quite successful. We finally applied and became our independent 501c3 non-profit in Fall 2020.
Today, except for our Craft Piano classes, we’ve built our concert offerings back to pre-pandemic levels. In 2022 we produced fifteen public performances over the year; we had nearly a thousand attendees, served over 1,000 pretzels from Easy Tiger (our pastry sponsor), and poured a literal butt load of beer from Lazarus Brewing (it’s an actual unit of measurement you can look it up). Surveys tell us that about thirty percent of our audience consists of people who have not attended classical concerts the previous year. Some respondents have said, “Beerthoven is my gateway drug to classical music.” I love thinking of it that way.
Would it have been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We had a lot of advantages early on, thanks to the support of the Austin Saengerrunde; they financially covered our first two full seasons and also had one of their chief staff members, a woman named Reagan Roland, work with me directly on a lot of the basics of concert production; ticketing, advertising, bringing in vendors, food and drink service, etc. As we kept growing, eventually, the training wheels had to come off. By 2017 I was handling those event management tasks myself, along with several friends and volunteers, particularly a fellow named Austin Howes and a few members of the Saengerrunde. That transition was rough, though; I remember many concerts when I only had two or three hours of sleep the night before as I was taking care of many last-minute needs. It seemed like there was some fire every show that had to be put out just before the performance started–the beer wasn’t flowing properly, or the ticketing system wasn’t working. Eventually, I brought in Mark and Kiki Corry and Theresa Claiborne; Kiki and Theresa had been friends of mine for some time and had volunteer and event management backgrounds. They did a lot of work building systems for us and managing our team. Kiki now serves as our Board Chair. Besides the challenges everyone faced during the pandemic, our trailer was stolen in the spring of 2020. Thankfully we did not have any equipment inside at the time, but it complicated our operations when setting up for concerts. I’ve become very familiar with U-Haul trucks this past year. It’s also one of the main reasons we still need to be able to bring the Craft Piano course back to life, though I hope to resurrect it shortly.
One of our growing pains has been the need to have hired staffing for parts of our operations. I’ve always ensured that the artists are paid fairly, but the rest of our event management, from selling tickets at the door to pouring beer, has been mainly by volunteers. We’ve been fortunate to have drawn a fair amount of benefactor support and donations organically, without much in the way of intentional funding campaigns. Still, we’re at a size now that requires we do more in the way of development. Many arts organizations depend on years of volunteer service, even from its Executive Director, to get started and make the arts sustainable. Eventually, people must be paid for their work, especially as Austin has become more expensive.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I enjoy a wide variety of work as a pianist and arts organizer; I’ve received a lot of high-level classical training as a pianist and use that to provide music for Riverbend Church and Memorial United Methodist Church, play for weddings, funerals, music festivals, and competitions (mostly as an accompanist at the moment) and other odd jobs, including the occasional Beerthoven performance. I currently have a private studio of 18 students, which I mostly teach out of my home. A couple of them are becoming quite skilled; one just played for a master class at the Manhattan School of Music and is playing works by Rachmaninoff and Chopin. After completing my Doctorate in piano performance at UT, I figured I would someday teach in academia, though I assumed I’d need to gather more world experience first. I got a call from Concordia University in Austin in the Fall of 2021 and taught for a year on their faculty; I may return eventually if their department needs my services again. Each element of my work gives me its unique joy, but if I had to choose what I “m most proud of, it would have to be what I’ve created in Beerthoven. In particular, I have a knack for curating satisfying programs by selecting artists and musical works. Connoisseurs typically will usually hear something at our programs they’ve never heard of and appreciate, while people new to classical music find the programs approachable and engaging. But aside from the purely musical elements of our shows, there’s a lot that goes into the framing of the music that is nearly just as important; everything from how seating is arranged to ensuring that there are supertitles with English translations for anything sung in a foreign language, to giving spirited and thoughtful spoken introductions of the programs and the music. Sometimes even great artists can only attract attention if they have the right support and framing for their art. That’s where arts organizations like Beerthoven can serve a really important role.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
We’re always looking for more volunteers for our events; it’s a great community of sophisticated but approachable people and a nice way to support the artists. We could especially use some strong people to help us move tables and chairs and kegs of beer. Home brewers are especially valuable to us as volunteers since they’ll know the ins and outs of operating the equipment. Email daniel@beerthoven.com if interested. We can always use support from some “Designated Drivers” who are interested in donating to unique arts organizations like ours, Business sponsors interested in supplying a matching grant or getting a half or full-page ad in our printed programs would also be welcome. You can find info on that on our Support page www.beerthoven.com/support. As a 501c3, donations to Beerthoven Inc are tax-deductible daniel@
We’re also happy to invite everyone to attend our upcoming program, May 5th, 6th, and 7th, The Grain in Spain. It’ll be an all-Spanish program with music for a piano trio featuring pianist Sohee Kwon, violinist Mariama Alcântara, and cellist Daniel Kopp. We’re also thrilled to have UT’s newest voice faculty member Liliana Guerrero with us to sing Manuel de Falla’s excellent song cycle Siete Canciones Populares Españolas. Tickets at www.beerthoven.com.
Pricing:
- $10 for students
- $25 Online
- $30 At the Door
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.beerthoven.com/
- Instagram: @beerthoven
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beerthoven
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Beerthoven
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@beerthoveninc
Image Credits
Justin Scarth and Mark Herber
