Jacinth Greywoode '12
Montgomery, Alabama
In the arts magnet high school Jacinth Greywoode attended in Montgomery, Ala., he was like a rock star, only his medium was classical music. Once or twice a month he competed in regional, district and state competitions as a pianist. Usually he received honors at those competitions, including a statewide honorable mention at the Music Teachers National Association competition.
Nevertheless, when Greywoode came to Princeton, he expected to major in math, following in the footsteps of his mother, who teaches math at Alabama State University. It didn’t work out that way.
He enrolled in a multivariate calculus course, took some computer science, and felt like he was headed in the direction of psychology with a linguistics certification. “But I realized that would take me into research or teaching,” he recalls. Meanwhile, he felt some pressure to match the accomplishments of his four siblings, three who decided to go into medicine and a fourth who is going into law. One of his sisters graduated from Princeton in 2007.
Play excerpts from Greywoode
performing Sonata in C major Op. 2.3, Beethoven and
Sonata in bb minor Op. 35, Chopin.
Unsure, Greywoode spoke to his father about his real passion – music composition. “We both came to the conclusion that it had been music all along, but that I had just been ignoring that. After I declared music as my major, he told me his uncle is a renowned composer in Africa and England. And that’s why my dad was okay with it; I think he felt like I got my uncle’s genius.”
Greywoode, whose parents came to the United States from Sierra Leone, was born in Clearwater, Fla., where he spent most of his youth before moving to Montgomery in his high school years. He is currently a music composition major and working on a music performance certificate with a focus on accompaniment. His course requirements include music theory and some Western and non-Western music history.
For his senior thesis, he is expected to do a composition, and for his junior paper he composed a piece that began as a three-note motif that had been running through his head. He also will be required to do a senior recital for the performance certificate.
“I didn’t do much composition before coming here, but for some courses the focus has been on composition throughout the semester,” he says. One composition class was with Steven Mackey, a Grammy-nominated guitarist.
Greywoode has supplemented his musical interests with courses in Chinese and Spanish, and with travel. He went to Australia during his freshman year with Princeton Faith in Action, and he spent the summer after his sophomore year in Ecuador on a self-organized evangelical fellowship, where he worked in an orphanage.