The Jacobs Faculty Bookshelf
This page serves as a listing of publications by Jacobs School of Music faculty. Click on an item to view available purchasing options as well as its availability on the IU Library Catalog.
This page serves as a listing of publications by Jacobs School of Music faculty. Click on an item to view available purchasing options as well as its availability on the IU Library Catalog.
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Pacifica Quartet , Otis Murphy
The Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet performs works by three Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary composers: Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
Written for the Pacifica and receiving its world-premiere recording, Ran’s Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory — String Quartet No. 3 is a moving tribute to painter Felix Nussbaum, who perished in Auschwitz in 1944. Higdon’s Voices, dedicated to the Pacifica, evokes explosive energy, otherworldly calm, and spiritual serenity. In Zwilich’s Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, a lusciously singing saxophone shares the spotlight with virtuosic string playing. The Pacifica, quartet in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, partner with their IU colleague, renowned classical saxophonist Otis Murphy.
Corno Da Capo - The Life and Adventures of an 18th Century Horn Player
Corno da Capo is a fantasy historical novel written especially for French horn players and musicians interested historical performance and music history. The general reader will also enjoy the story and learn much about European court musicians and traveling soloists in the last quarter of the 18th century.
The story follows the adventures of John Paulson, 21st century American horn player, who finds himself dropped into Paris in the year 1770, and how he survives and pursues a brilliant career as the 18th century Bohemian horn soloist Johann Palsa. Upon his arrival, he is befriended by horn player Carl Türrschmidt, and during their many adventures together, they become the most celebrated horn duo of the time.
This fictionalized story of these actual 18th century horn players, who were superstars during their lifetimes, is based on the relatively little information that has come down to us about them. The documented information about their lives is presented in the notes at the back of the book.
Thomas Walsh , Scott Reeves
The leading textbook in jazz improvisation, Creative Jazz Improvisation, Fifth Edition is a compendium of knowledge and practice resources for the university classroom, suitable for all musicians looking to develop and sharpen their soloing skills. Logically organized and guided by a philosophy that encourages creativity, this book presents practical advice beyond the theoretical, featuring exercises to practice, ear training and keyboard drills, songs to learn, and a wide range of solo transcriptions. Chapters highlight discussions of jazz theory - covering topics such as modes forms, chord substitutions, pentatonic scales, intervallic improvisation, free improvisation, and more - featuring updated content throughout.
Declarations: Music Between the Wars
The Pacifica Quartet mines the artistic ferment of the interwar years with a program of gems from the 1920s and early 30s. Hindemith’s stunning String Quartet No. 4, Op. 22 (1922) takes listeners on an amazing musical journey. Janácek’s fervent String Quartet No. 2 (“Intimate Letters”) from 1928 expresses the mature composer’s white-hot passion for a much younger woman. And the Pacifica revives the most significant composition by American Ruth Crawford Seeger: her dramatic 1931 String Quartet, which noted composer and critic Virgil Thomson hailed as “a noble piece of work.”
Halina Goldberg , Jonathan Bellman
The works in this volume, chosen to reflect the breadth of narrative and characteristic piano music, illuminate certain largely forgotten musical histories. The highly popular genre of the descriptive piano fantasia, conceived and produced for the musical tastes and technical capabilities of amateur pianists, grew out of eighteenth-century narrative works such as Johann Kuhnau’s “Biblical Sonatas” (1700) and the anonymous Battle of Rosbach (ca. 1780). Starting with František Kocžwara’s Battle of Prague (ca. 1788) and continuing chronologically through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, these works help to contextualize nineteenth-century aesthetic debates of descriptive versus idealistic music (and later programmatic versus absolute music), and the partisanship they engendered, by demonstrating the ubiquity of this repertoire throughout Europe and the United States. Such fantasias reflected cultural preoccupations, based as they often were on historical or fictional events, and were particularly important in Poland, where national upheaval and political marginalization provided fertile ground for musical representation and catharsis. The descriptive fantasias cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by such composers as Fryderyk Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms, and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.
Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome
Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism (iconography, ekphrasis, imagination) in late seventeenth-century Italian opera. Includes close musical and textual analysis of Alessandro Scarlatti's opera La Statira (Rome, 1690) and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera La forza della virtu (Venice, 1693).
Dvorak: Quartet Op. 106 and Quintet Op. 97
Pacifica Quartet , Michael Tree
Dvorak composed his richly textured String Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (1893) during a sojourn in Iowa. It radiates Dvorak’s warmth and humanity while also echoing his encounters with the music of different Native American tribes. Poetic and expressive, the landmark String Quartet No. 13 in G Major, Op. 106 (1895) shows Dvorak in his creative prime. On this new Cedille recording, the Naumburg Award-winning Pacifica Quartet, a bold and dynamic young ensemble (“They all move on the same strong, supple band of time.” — New York Times), rises to the challenge, joined in the quintet by violist Michael Tree of the Guarneri Quartet.
String Quartets by Easley Blackwood
Blackwood’s First and Second quartets are products of the same creative period as his most celebrated early modernist masterpiece, his Symphony No. 1 (1955). In the CD booklet, Blackwood describes the quartets as “largely atonal, although not violently dissonant.” He says they “reveal the influence of Bartok, Berg, and Hindemith” (with whom Blackwood studied at Yale). The First Quartet received its premiere at the Berkshire Music Center in 1957 in a performance by the Kroll Quartet. The Second Quartet was premiered at the Library of Congress in 1960 by the Juilliard Quartet. “Blackwood’s [second] quartet is a work of immediate beauty,” the Washington Post’s Paul Hume wrote on Jan. 9, 1960. “One is conscious at every point of the quartet of the [composer’s] ease and personal affiliation with the medium.”
Eben: Velvet Revolution, Complete Organ Music Vol.1
Janette Fishell , D. James Tagg
Velvet Revolution is a multidimensional project that will ultimately include extended essays and a teaching video centering on the works and aesthetic of the 20th century Czech composer Petr Eben, one of the most important contributors to contemporary organ repertoire and a mentor to Janette Fishell. The first three of six recordings were issued by the Dutch label Brilliant Classics in October, 2022 as Volume 1 of Petr Eben Velvet Revolution: Complete Organ Music. When finished in late 2023, it will be the first complete recorded collection of this important composer's solo organ works.
Elliott Carter String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5
Released to celebrate the American master Elliott Carter’s centenary, this 2009 Grammy Award-winning recording is the first of two discs of the complete String Quartets. Carter himself has written: ‘I probably decided to write what was to be the First Quartet when I read about a composition prize in Liège, Belgium, because there were many ideas swarming around in my imagination about expression, rhythm, and harmony, mostly derived from my Cello Sonata ... Then my Second, Third, and Fourth Quartets developed my imaginings in different ways until I began to realize that soon I would exhaust this direction, and so my Fifth Quartet became a farewell to the previous four and an exploration of a new vision.’