Richard Gene Swift, a composer, professor emeritus and Distinguished Teaching Award recipient who played a central role in founding the UC Davis Department of Music, its programs and curriculum -- including establishing the artist-in-residence program -- died Nov. 8 in Davis. He was 76.
A concert celebrating his life and works is planned.
Swift was born in Middlepoint, Ohio, on Sept. 24, 1927. He studied composition privately with Grover Buxton and John Sherwood from 1940-47, and served in the U.S. Army from 1950-52, teaching at the Third Armored Division Band School in Fort Knox, KY.
In 1953 he began attending the University of Chicago, where he studied composition with Grosvenor Cooper, Leland Smith and Leonard Meyer. After completing his graduate work at Chicago (MA, '56) he was invited to become a faculty member of the nascent Department of Music at UC Davis.
Music department founder Jerome Rosen wrote in a history of the department that at the time he was hired Swift had "already shown himself to be a gifted and productive composer -- one of his orchestral works had recently been recorded by the Louisville Symphony."
Rosen soon came to consider Swift a co-founder of the department -- due to his wise counsel, because of his role in selecting music scores and learned books for the department library, and for the quality and breadth of his teaching in the areas of music composition, theory and history.
Swift served as chair of the music department from 1963 to 1971, overseeing the formation of a master's degree program, developing a partnership with the University's Committee on Research to present concerts of new works, and conceiving and establishing the artist-in-residence program that continues to bring distinguished visiting artists to the department to teach students and present public concerts.
UC Davis colleague Professor D. Kern Holoman recalls that for decades Swift was, for many, the intellectual foundation of the department, a distinguished composer of the serialist school who helped make UC Davis a famous locus of new music.
Swift composed more than 100 works for opera, orchestra, chamber ensemble, voice, solo piano, flute and guitar. He retired from the department in 1991.
His many awards include: a Rockefeller Foundation-Louisville Orchestra Young Composers Award (1955); a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies at Princeton University (1959, 1960); the Rockefeller Foundation Performance Award (Oakland Symphony, 1968); the Composers String Quarter Award (1973); a National Endowment for the Arts award(1976-77); the American Institute -- Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1978); an annual ASCAP Award for Serious Music (1988-1992); and the UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award (1980).
In addition, he was a member of the American Music Center, ASCAP, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the San Francisco Composers Forum, the College Music Society, and the American Society of University Composers. He also served as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1977-1978), chairman of the UC Davis Integrated Studies program (1969-1971), and as a UC faculty research lecturer (1983-1984).
Swift was also active as a writer and editor, contributing to the University of California Press, American Musicological Society journal, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Dictionary of American Music, Notes, Perspectives of New Music and other publications. He had a founding role as consulting editor to the UC journal 19th-Century Music, produced at the Davis campus.
Swift was preceded in death by his wife, Dorothy Zackrisson Swift. He is survived by three sisters, three sons, a daughter-in law and six grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Food Bank of Yolo County, Communicare community health clinic, or the American Lung Association.