Radway grew up in Farmingdale, Me., a small town along the right bank of the Kennebec River. He describes his home as "a small, liberally minded, artsy town full of bookshops and coffee-shops to the north, and a slightly larger, more traditionally Central Maine town to the south," which sounds an awful lot like Amherst.
When he visited the College, he was pleased to find interesting and interested students and faculty. The lovely Valley, extraordinary academic departments and perfect size and location convinced Radway to attend Amherst.
Double major
As to how he came about declaring majors in both music and English, Radway remarked, "I love music, I love books and the rest just happened." He had almost always assumed that he would become a music major. His taste in music spans a huge range.
Radway put it most poetically when he said, "There's music for moving and music for standing still, music for the background and music for total concentration, music that talks to you and music that mocks you. Sometimes I want to listen to something that I know it'll take me a few decades to figure out; sometimes I want a song so simple that anybody with a voice and a cheap guitar could do it just as well as the people on the record."
Meanwhile, his studies in English took much more consideration. For two and a half years, he mused about majoring in English and then realized that he could in fact fulfill the requirements. His interests in literature are inclined toward the magical-realist style. Radway finds inspiration in the works of Rushdie, Borges and Calvino. "Seeing the world through the eyes of something slightly unfamiliar makes everything seem so close and real, he said."
Double thesis
With Radway's two majors came two senior theses. His music thesis is titled "Leave-Taking and World-View in Mahler's Ninth Symphony." He describes the Mahler composition as "a wonderful and fascinating piece of music with a lot of cultural stigma attached to it." Because of that "cultural stigmata," Radway sought to focus on the music itself and his own interpretation of the symphony. He began work on Mahler in a seminar last year with Professor of Music Jenny Kallick. Kallick offered high praise for Radway's work. "John succeeded in forging a highly individualistic, yet carefully controlled, essay on Mahler's 'Ninth Symphony' aesthetic, which draws judiciously upon the evidence of closely considered musical analysis," she said. "Knowing John's wide-ranging musical interests and his love of poetry, I am delighted that he found a way to write about Mahler as a musical poet and kindred spirit."
For his English major, Radway composed a portfolio of poetry and an essay. His work started in his sophomore year during which he took Professor of English David Sofield's seminar, Poetry 1950-2005. When he mentioned that he had written his own poetry, Sofield welcomed him to share one of his poems. Radway recollects, "I rooted through my desk and to my horror found that everything I'd written looked much paler than I remembered." Consequently, he wrote a new poem about just that-searching for old poems in his desk. With Sofield's encouragement, Radway continued to write and the best pieces were collected in his final portfolio. "What [strikes] one about the poems, in addition to a liveliness of expression, is the formidable range of subject and feeling," Sofield remarked. "John imagines and re-imagines not only the landscapes and seascapes of his native small-town Maine, but those of the Shetland Islands. His is an amazingly fertile mind, fully capable of representing a 19th-century sea-captain's daughter or a shepherd in the Khyber Pass as readily as a friend who, while elsewhere, has left his small garden untended." In his portfolio, Radway also included an exceptional essay on two of Seamus Heaney's poems, "District and Circle" (a piece about the London Underground station that terrorists had recently attacked) and "The Blackbird of Glanmore" (a work that explores the extent to which this bird symbolizes death). Sofield lauded the composition as "transparent and penetrating." He added, "And all of this is handled in a writerly voice blessed with exemplary modesty."
Having completed his theses, Radway believes that the work was "truly worth the struggle. The exciting possibilities of the future now color everything." He is happy to have had the opportunity to study Mahler's symphony so thoroughly and to explore his poetic creativity, an exploration that he hopes to continue.
Radway appropriately cites his thesis advisors, Kallick and Sofield, as his most influential professors. Radway also enjoyed working with the faculty, and now friends, of the music, English and Russian departments. He has given much study to both medieval English and Russian language and literature.
An enriching four years
Although Radway could not decide which of his courses was his favorite-because he had so many favorites-he remarked that the best moments occurred when his four classes inadvertently coalesced into one large class. He wishes that he had taken more classes with some great professors and had attended some more of the interesting lectures that the College regularly offers. Radway does not have any major regrets, but he would have liked to discover earlier the particular potted plants that flourish in low-light environments and so could thrive in his dorm room. Now, of course, he lives with several of these plants and they enliven his room.
According to Radway, the best part of his Amherst experience was when he awoke early to see a bare campus tinged with fog while "the birds and squirrels give you funny looks as though you're interrupting them." Those mornings, he would consider "all the people who will get to see the same trees and sky during the next 18 hours." Radway advises Amherst students to enjoy the College doing whatever it is they love. "And visit the Music Library frequently," he added.
His work on campus is once again telling with respect to his two majors. Radway has worked at the Morgan Music Library since the first week after Orientation. Though he did not offer any library-related anecdotes, he emphasized how the library "creates one long, lasting impression" so he feels as if he had never left. Always the adventurous librarian, he takes "an undue delight in the fact that so many items are so hard to find. I wonder what might be hidden back there, tucked behind some part of the Dewey section that no one visits. Some lost medieval manuscript no doubt." Radway is also a Writing Tutor for the Writing Center. His tutees praise him for his kindness when he helps to edit their work. He explained, "I figure that taking a half-finished paper to a total (or quasi) stranger for criticism can't be easy, so I try to make people feel at ease."
Radway also participates in Wednesday Night Shakespeare. Kate Robinson '08 recently directed Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale," in which Radway portrayed the bear. Yes, that bear. The one that chases Antigonus offstage. According to Radway, this performance was the first time that he had ever donned a bear suit, not to mention the first time he had pursued someone while wearing the suit. Although learning to roar and growl like a bear was fairly straightforward to Radway, he admits that jumping off the stage without crashing into the audience or light board was most difficult. He assures me that no one, not even a bear, was harmed in this production. Nevertheless, Michael Chernicoff '09, who played Antigonus, revealed that Radway threatened to eat him even after the play was over.
During his Amherst summers, Radway scanned groceries, worked at the Office of Admission and honed his backwards walking skills. Last summer, he obtained a grant to fund his thesis research as he worked on campus. Radway translated this to mean he spent "a lot of [time] listening to Mahler in the shade." In addition, he studied fiddle music and "a totally incomprehensible dialect of English" in the Shetland Islands with the support of the English department.
Radway admires the people of Shetland. The Shetland residents not only build their own sheds, but demonstrate "ingenuity and friendliness." In addition, he admires one of his elderly neighbors who continued to grow his own vegetables when he was 90 years old.
In his spare time, Radway enjoys taking long walks in the woods and playing stringed instruments in his room. And, on occasion, he will play those instruments in the woods. When making his own music, he fiddles about-literally, in that he plays the fiddle-or he brings his bagpipes outside. He reads, writes, hangs out with friends, seeks "small adventures," as he calls them, and throws in a pinch of contradancing to fill his free hours.
Understanding the world
After he graduates, Radway is going to find a home in Ithaca, N.Y., with Gabrielle Ruddick '07. "After four years of dorm life, I'm ready to live somewhere with a kitchen and a cat." At that time, he hopes to work at a fine bookstore as he completes applications to graduate schools in the fall. From then on, Radway hopes to gain "an ever deepening understanding of the world, however that might come about."
Given his great academic achievements, "John Radway may be the best of the best," as Sofield claimed. According to the English professor, "His backhand volley may be his one vulnerability."