Julian Hook

Ph.D. (Indiana University), Associate Professor

juhook @ indiana.edu

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
1201 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7006

Office: Simon 225J
Phone: 856-0121
Fax: (812) 855-4936

Julian (“Jay”) Hook, Associate Professor of Music Theory, holds advanced degrees in mathematics, architecture, and piano performance as well as music theory. He has taught mathematics at Florida International University in Miami, and music theory at Penn State University. He has also has worked as an architect and structural engineer in Chicago, and has performed chamber music on several occasions with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2002 he completed his doctorate in Music Theory at Indiana University; during his years as a graduate student at IU he also won a piano concerto competition and received an award for outstanding teaching.

Dr. Hook has presented papers at conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the American Mathematical Society, and other organizations, and serves as Reviews Editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music. His research involves transformational theory, particularly neo-Riemannian transformations and other algebraic approaches to the study of musical structure. His article “Uniform Triadic Transformations,” published in the Journal of Music Theory, won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2005. Other recent publications include a “Perspective” on mathematical music theory in the journal Science; a survey of applications of group theory in music, published by Princeton University Press in a collection of mathematics essays; an article on the foundations of transformation theory, published in Music Theory Spectrum;  a study of the mathematical basis of key signatures and enharmonic equivalence, published in the Journal of Mathematics and Music; the article “Signature Transformations” in the book Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations, published by the University of Rochester Press; a review article on the new edition of David Lewin’s Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, published in Intégral; and an article on the twelve-tone music of Webern, coauthored with Jack Douthett and published in Perspectives of New Music.