My name is Adam Sweet. Welcome to my blog!
I studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music and the Conservatory of Music at Rivers. I traveled Europe with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. I was principal violist of the Five College Symphony Orchestra.
I have a BA in Music from Hampshire College where I studied Ethnomusicology, Composition, Theory, Electronic Music, Jazz and World Music. My BA is in Expressive Arts Therapy.
At Hampshire, I played bluegrass fiddle with various roots and traditional bands. Including Pieces of Neck with Sarah Lawson, Greg Highlands, Match Atkinson, Owen Bradley and Scott Coleman, and the Lonesome Fish Quintet with Jim Henry. We opened for Vassar Clements and Johnathan Edwards at the now defunct Rusty Nail in Hadley. I bought my first mandolin at Fretted Instrument Workshop in Amherst and formed Backwoods Medicine with Tom Hanway, Alan Lasky and Dan Wolfson.
One of my favorite classes while I was in college was at Amherst College by David Reck, an ethnomusicologist. It was called "The Music of E.E. Cummings". It was a composition class. I learned more about self expression in that class than all the years prior. I began composing music that year, and have continued ever since.
The first major composition was "Death of the Serious Musician" recorded at Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College and mastered in the Electronic Music studio at Hampshire. Other major recording projects have included a piano concerto called "For Kawai", an Electronic Composition called "Frog Pond Stomp" with Steve Schreiber and J. Phillip Argyris, and a synth compilation series of songs with lyrics based on Bob Dylan's "This Wheel's On Fire". I don't have the recordings of any of those early works, because they were on reel-to-reel tapes, and that technology is gone.
Fortunately, I do have a Bandcamp page where I can digitally collect my works. I've been uploading old and newer compositions to that page ever since. I have completed the following albums:
- The Pioneer Valley - a group of songs and melodies about the area I live
- Sweet Songs Laboratory - a double album set of experimental and electronic dance music
- Saltando Per Silvas - an album of Latin and French inspired songs
- Granby Life - an album of my life in Granby, Massachusetts
- Clam Or Bisque? - an album of songs and stories growing up in New England
- Shamrock Dance - an album of traditional Irish and original "celtic" melodies
- The Seven Sisters - an album of songs written for western Mass and the area I live in
- An American Life - an album of songs about my life growing up in Massachusetts
My parents paid for my tuition at Hampshire College, and I got jobs to cover the other expenses. I worked at Physical Plant two years in a row, was a counselor at Farm & Wilderness camps in Vermont in 1983, and a cashier at a gas station in Amherst 1984-1985. My college girlfriend was Elizabeth Walton. She and I rented a house in Amherst on Baker Street. It was lovely. We were married in 1986.
That winter, I was hired as the Receiving Department Manager at Bread & Circus in Hadley. Within 2 years, I was promoted to Beer, Wine & Cheese department manager. I was also the brainiac in the company, and encouraged to bring some of my coding and design tools to computers that they had just installed at their Central Packaging warehouse for inventory and later Bookkeeping departments.
In 1988, I bought a house in Shelburne, right on the border with Colrain and next to the Green River. That same year, I joined the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and the Valley Light Opera on viola
In 1989, I joined Maple Ridge, a Bluegrass band in Greenfield, playing a mix of acoustic country, originals and western swing with Terry Atkinson, John Rough and Joe Blumenthal.
I left Bread & Circus in 1992 to get a job at the Massachusetts General Hospital as Operations Coordinator of the Main OR. That summer, I traded in my Chevy S10 pickup for a used VW Vanagon "Weekender" camper. I drove around the United States, hiking and camping in every state park I could find, and eventually visiting the place in Olympia Washington where I lived with my parents and older brother Tom when I was a baby. We found a buyer for our house in Carmel, California where Clint Eastwood was Mayor at the time. We sold it via fax! We returned to Shelburne to pack up our house and move in with my parents at the old home in Weston while we worked for MGH.
In 1993, I was asked to apply for a general manager job at Dr. Hauschka Cosmetics USA. They hired me to set up the customer service, inside sales and shipping departments. In 1995, they promoted me to National Sales Manager and I went on the road to meet with key buyers across the country.
Over the course of the next few years, I visited every major city where natural foods or skin care companies were listed, meeting with top buyers, owners and founders. I got to know the country quite well.
In 1995, I met Brian Bender at a Klezmer gig at the Northampton Brewery. With a grant from NEFFA, we formed the Northampton Contradance later that same year as Fiddle Hill, working with a group of callers and musicians in the 4th floor ballroom above Fitzwilly's. Fiddle Hill performed for contradances, Scottish dances and traditional New England dances throughout New England and New York. At one of these dances, I met Mary Doherty who invited me to stay at her B&B in Kilfenora.
I lived in Germany for three months in the spring of 1995 while I worked for Dr. Hauschka Cosmetics in Hatfield. I had to learn some conversational German before I left, so I hired a private tutor. They didn't speak English at Wala Heilmittel in Eckwalden, Germany, so I got by with some French, Latin and picked up German as I went along. It was a fantastic experience.
When I returned from my trip, the internet had become a thing. I went back to school to learn how to design websites. I got a certificate in Web Design from Greenfield Community College and began to work on the first Dr Hauschka intranet for customer service. Later, the intranet was used by inside sales, and eventually it became the website used by all customers and people looking for information about the product.
My wife and I went to Ireland in 1996. I played fiddle at Linnane's Pub in Kilfenora, and studied with Frankie Gavin, the then all time world champion Irish fiddler.
In 1997, I bought a log house in Belchertown on 6 acres of piney woods. It was sublime. That same year, I was asked to join Swift River, an all original Newgrass band out of Holyoke with Claiborne Woodall, John Rough and Bruce Fischer. That same year, I co-founded Woodkerne, a traditional Irish quartet with Dan Richardson and Paul Burton. We played music for weddings, private parties and town halls throughout New England.
I left Dr Hauschka Cosmetics in 1998 to become a full time consultant offering sales and marketing as well as web development and special projects.
Consulting / Web Development / Social Media
The first consulting job I got after Dr. Hauschka was a company called Herbs for Kids. They hired me to develop a training program, write and implement a sales plan. The owner, Sunny Mavor, wanted to sell the company to the top bidder which she did that following year at Natural Products Expo East in Baltimore, MD.
After that, I consulted with a series of natural products manufacturers including Turtle Island Herbs, Wise Ways Herbs and Rawson Brook farm, a company that made cheese from goat's milk! It was an exciting time.
One of my favorite consulting jobs was a contract with Apple Hill, the center for chamber music I had attended in High School. The then director, Eric Stumacher, hired me to design the website and set up a way that donors could use their credit cards securely to make payments. This was before PayPal, and a way that the chamber group could upload videos of their concerts so that members could watch them. This was before YouTube. I wrote the code for both a secure payment system and a compression system for digital video. While I was working in Keene, I taught music for KIMRA, the Keene Institute for Music and Related Arts. I had several interesting students. I taught in Keene between 1998 and 2009.
In 1999, Brian and I went to Egypt to play Irish and Klezmer on stage in front of the Great Pyramids. My first trip to China was also that year.
Parker Walton Sweet
Our oldest son, Parker, was born in July of 1999. He's now a successful businessman and 2nd Lieutenant in the National Guard.
Beth and I adopted Parker from an orphanage in South Korea. We had always wanted children of our own, but when we learned that wouldn't be possible, we found Wide Horizons for Children, an agency, and made arrangements to find a baby in South Korea. At the time, children born out of wedlock were given up for adoption because according to Korean history, they had no "blood" since they weren't part of a marriage couple. So sad! Anyway, we were alerted to our son's birth and made arrangements to visit the country to retrieve him when he was old enough to travel.
Parker, or Bina, as we call him, is a very bright person. He was given a full scholarship to attend a private school in Easthampton. He decided to go to UMass Amherst, even though he was brilliant enough to get in to any Ivy League school that would have him. He quickly finished his BA and his Masters in public health, all within 4 years instead of the usual 6 years that would entail.
During the covid pandemic, Bina became the coordinator of UMass' COVID response. He was in charge of teams of people who contacted possibly infected students and staff to make arrangements for their quarantine and subsequent testing. It was incredibly complicated and difficult, but he did it. He was awarded by Charlie Baker, the then Governor of Massachusetts. Upon graduation, he went to work for the Governor's office in Administration. He is a successful individual with many skills.
In 2000, Stamell Stringed Instruments in Amherst asked me to come on board to help them with their sales department, and to optimize their website for the sale of musical instruments. I developed a system for uploading high def pictures of violins, violas and cellos before Google Photos, Adobe Photoshop or any other photo editing service existed.
Matt Stamell introduced me to Eric Husemoller, a man who imported animal and human hair from Asia for sale to companies in the western world. He was having some legal difficulties and needed some help designing a website and writing a sales and marketing plan. I came on as a consultant initially, and in 2002 formed a partnership called the Pioneer Valley Luthier Supply Company. We sold horse tail hair for bows, unfinished violins and violas, tonewood, and fittings. I traveled to trade shows in California, Kentucky, Washington DC, Frankfurt, Germany and Shanghai, China. At one point, I knew the owners and luthiers for every violin and bow shop in the US, Canada, England, South Korea and Japan!
In 2004, I took a consulting job with a company called Amherst Fitness. They owned a Gold's Gym franchise and needed a website, a sales and marketing plan, and someone to implement it.
In 2007, I was hired by a company in Swanzey, NH that made greeting cards out of kenaf, a kudzu-like plant that grew all over the south, and from recycled paper. That was an interesting company! I wore many hats while I was there, mainly sourcing products for a Whole Foods endcap, and for a Barnes & Noble Christmas special: recycled ornaments from India, organic seed - embedded bookmarks, tipped-on cards and more.
Richard Park Sweet
In 2012, I co-founded Mandolin New England with Will Melton and Josh Bell. Our first public performance was at the South Hadley Town Hall in 2015, our second at the Center Church in South Hadley in 2017. We also performed regularly at the Porter Phelps-Huntington Museum in Hadley, and the Renaissance Center at UMass Amherst.
In 2013, I formed a partnership with Celtic Heels school of dance in Greenfield to put on a series of performances of A Celtic Nutcracker at the Academy of Music in Northampton, and the Bowker Auditorium at UMass Amherst.
The Granby Farm
One of the first things I did when we moved in was find a place for our chickens to roost. We had had six chickens when we lived in South Hadley and I built an enclosure for them to roost safely, and a rather large run for them to use for exercise. I fed them grain and kitchen scraps. They gave me manure, which I used on the garden.
The image to the right shows our old chicken coop. We have bears in our woods and as it turns out, they like fresh chicken! Between 2018 and 2020, the bears ate all of our chickens. At one point, the sow tore the back end of the chicken coop off and rushed inside to catch 3 of the hens while they were roosting. The others fled inside the wired off area. The bear couldn't get in there, but the red tailed hawks could. They flew down and took away the chickens that were left.
Our neighbor also has chickens. He has had several run-ins with the bears. His solution was to build a sturdy chicken house, and to cover the run with multiple layers of wire fence as well as an electric fence. My solution is not to have chickens.
The Korean Church
Emily goes to a church in Amherst every Sunday. She sings in the choir She is friends with most of the ladies there. Some of them she knows from work at UMass, some of them from the area. The Korean network is tiny and everybody knows everybody else as you can imagine.
I like to go there myself. The acoustics are amazing, as you can imagine. Mr. Song invited me to join an Easter Celebration one year, and to bring my violin. I enjoyed myself so much.
I asked to be invited for future musical events. I played with them for at least 3 or 4 more events before Mr Song announced to the members that he was leaving. He was moving back to California, where the rest of his family was.
What Does The Future Hold?