Jacobs School of Music

Phone:

812-856-0121

Email:

juhook@indiana.edu

Department:

Music Theory

Education

• Ph.D. (music theory), Indiana University, 2002
• M.M. (piano), Indiana University, 1997
• M.Arch. (architecture), University of Illinois, 1989
• Ph.D. (mathematics), Princeton University, 1983
• B.A. (mathematics), Indiana University, 1979

Biography

Julian (“Jay”) Hook is associate professor of music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he has taught since 2003. His research involves transformational theory and other mathematical approaches to the study of musical structure.

Hook’s article “Uniform Triadic Transformations” won the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2005. He has presented papers at conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the American Mathematical Society, the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music, and other organizations, and is currently writing a book titled Exploring Musical Spaces. He served for six years as reviews editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, and for two years as president of Music Theory Midwest. In 2010–11 he was the recipient of a sabbatical fellowship from the American Philosophical Society.

Hook holds advanced degrees in mathematics, architecture, and piano performance as well as music theory. As a graduate student at Indiana University, he won a piano concerto competition and received an award for outstanding teaching. He has taught mathematics at Florida International University and music theory at Penn State University. He 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.

Selected Recent Publications

“Why Are There Twenty-Nine Tetrachords? A Tutorial on Combinatorics and Enumeration in Music Theory,” Music Theory Online 13/4 (2007).  

“David Lewin and the Complexity of the Beautiful,” Intégral 21 (2007), 155–190.

“Signature Transformations,” Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations, ed. Jack Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, and Charles J. Smith (University of Rochester Press, 2008), 137–160.

“Uniform Triadic Transformations and the Twelve-Tone Music of Webern” (with Jack Douthett), Perspectives of New Music 46/1 (2008), 91–151.

Review of Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music:Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford University Press, 2011), Music Theory Online 17/3 (2011).  

“How to Perform Impossible Rhythms,” Music Theory Online 17/4 (2011) .  

“Spelled Heptachords,” Mathematics and Computation in Music, Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (Springer, 2011), 84–97.

“Contemporary Methods in Mathematical Music Theory: A Comparative Case Study,” Journal of Mathematics and Music 7/2 (2013), 89–102.

“Generic Sequences and the Generic Tonnetz,” in Oxford Handbooks Online (2014).