Simon Music Center, M325J
Education
- Ph.D., Brandeis University, 2008
- M.F.A., Brandeis University, 2004
- B.A., summa cum laude, Wellesley College, 2000
Jacquelyn Sholes is assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Sholes was previously lecturer in music at the University of Rochester. Her work explores narratives composers create in or about their music as a means of constructing identities and situating themselves historically and culturally. Her research focuses on how composers position themselves through references to music of others and through their marketing of their work and themselves.
Her first book, Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms’s Instrumental Music (Indiana University Press, 2018), argues that the allusions by Brahms to music of predecessors articulate movement-spanning narratives reflecting his struggles to define his historical position. Her current book project focuses on Leonard Bernstein.
Sholes edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press, 2021) on the influence of Beethoven on Brahms and his circle, based on a symposium she organized for Boston University’s Center for Beethoven Research, where she served as acting co-director with Lewis Lockwood in 2018. She has authored articles and reviews in journals including 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, and Music & Letters, as well as book chapters, reference articles, and score prefaces.
Sholes has engaged in projects intersecting with women’s studies, art history, film, mathematics, and neuroscience, co-authoring a publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has presented work to the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, German Studies Association, and Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and at the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music and has been a featured speaker at events hosted by Phi Beta Kappa and the Center for Historical Keyboards at Cornell University.
She serves on the boards of directors of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, American Brahms Society, and Phi Beta Kappa Association of Boston (of which she is president), is book review editor for College Music Symposium, and is a past president of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society.
Sholes has held visiting faculty appointments at the University of Rochester, Central Connecticut State University, Boston University, Brown University, Wellesley College, and Williams College.