New York born, part Japanese part Norwegian, living in Copenhagen and Principal Conductor of an orchestra in one of the United Kingdom's principalities. How universal can Joseph Swensen get?

He laughs (as he is often wont to do), and fills in his extraordinary family background:

Both my Japanese and my Norwegian grandparents emigrated to America during the early years of the 20^th century. My paternal grandmother went through Ellis Island, alongside thousands of other European immigrants, but my Norwegian grandfather's story was a bit more colourful; arriving when he was 14, alone, illegally, and speaking no English. He was one of 12 children when his family lost all their wealth in a property swindle. All the children were sent out to work, and my grandfather was put on a shipping vessel, when he was 12. He sailed around the world for a couple of years and, apparently, when he was told that they were docked off the coast of Florida, he dived off the side of the ship and he swam to shore. Speaking no English he somehow made his way to the New York area where he was told there were some Norwegian people living.

On the other side of the family, my Japanese grandparents had seven children and my mother was the youngest of those. She was 12 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and even though the family all felt American and were American citizens, being of Japanese descent - and especially living in Hawaii - they were in serious trouble. My grandfather was interned by the US Government in the New Mexico desert for the duration of the war, which eventually led to his premature death.

It was traditional in my mother's family that my grandfather promised all his children (my mother had six older siblings) that after they had finished high school they could either attend university in America or in Japan. Of those older siblings, two brothers and one sister went to America and two brothers and one sister went back to Japan. As the family was originally from Hiroshima, my mother's eldest sister, Shizue, decided to study there and was killed at the age of 19, when the atomic bomb was dropped (a composition of mine entitled Shizue was written in memory of my mother's sister in 1996). My mother, some years later, chose to study piano in New York, arriving whilst still in her teens.

When my parents met in New York, my mother had been living there already for about ten years. She was a piano student of Isabelle Vengerova at the prestigious Mannes School of Music. Vengerova was also the teacher of Leonard Bernstein, Gary Graffman and Lillian Kallir. My mother could never understand why she was in that kind of company because she never considered herself a truly accomplished pianist, technically speaking. Yet she is incredibly musical and produces the most beautiful tone on the piano I think I've ever heard anyone make. Furthermore, she is one of the most gifted teachers of children I have ever come across. Her boundless enthusiasm and energy have always been inspiring to me.

I grew up listening to my parents play chamber music together. My father is a clarinettist. He was born in New Jersey, grew up in a blue-collar neighbourhood and somehow discovered Beethoven. I suspect it was Toscanini and the NBC broadcasts that enlightened him to this kind of music. My grandfather - a carpenter - lost all his work during the depression just before my father was born.

But my grandmother, who must have had a feeling about my dad's potential, saved pennies from the food budget in order to eventually pay for clarinet lessons and even buy him his first clarinet. This was apparently kept secret from my grandfather for many years who couldn't comprehend why a family living in poverty ought to be encouraging their only son to be a classical musician! (I also suspect he didn't have much respect for professional musicians; this just wasn't 'real work' to him.)

So it wasn't terribly surprising that when my dad was accepted into the Juilliard School, he received no support from his father, this in spite of his being singled out by the faculty there as being an extraordinary talent, one who's career path should certainly point toward a principal position in one of America's great orchestras. But my father had other interests. His political activism and left-leaning ideals made it difficult for him to be sympathetic to the way that classical music was run at that time in America, where just a few very wealthy individuals were responsible for the salaries of hundreds and hundreds of hard-working musicians. So, after receiving his bachelors and masters degrees from Juilliard, he went on to Columbia University - this was in the early 60s -not to study performance, but rather education. I was born in 1960 and he was at Columbia until I was seven years old, when he finally got his doctorate (I was the eldest of three children by then). We lived in a housing project in Harlem, New York City and he drove a cab all night in order to support us while putting himself through school. The family had little money, but somehow he was paying for my violin lessons anyway. I didn't see him very much during those years. He completed his dissertation in 1967 at the climax of all the political upheaval in which he played a role - particularly the anti-Vietnam War protests.

It was fascinating to grow up in that environment, with that kind of energy and with those kinds of ideas. After he received his doctorate he decided to teach music to schoolchildren in the South Bronx, one of the most deprived and dangerous areas of New York City... for that matter, America. He was probably the most overqualified person ever to teach in the New York City public school system.