Jacquelyn Sholes

Jacquelyn Sholes is a musicologist and a faculty member in the Arthur Satz Department of Music at the University of Rochester, where she teaches music history and theory. She has been involved in interdisciplinary and collaborative projects intersecting with such fields as women's studies, the visual arts, film, popular culture studies, commemorative culture studies, mathematics, technology, and neuroscience. Her core work, however, explores the narratives that composers (especially from the late eighteenth century to the present) create in or about their music as a means of constructing identities and situating their work and themselves historically and culturally.

 

Her research has focused in particular on ways in which composers seek to position themselves through references to works of others, through self-reference, and/or through their methods of marketing their music and themselves to the public. Her first book, Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms’s Instrumental Music (Indiana University Press, 2018), highlights how Brahms weaves allusions to the music of earlier and contemporaneous composers (Bach, D. Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) into broad narratives that can span multi-movement works. These narratives, she suggests, served as outlets for Brahms's complicated attitudes toward the classical music canon coalescing during his lifetime, as he struggled to define his position in history while grappling with a Bloomian "anxiety of influence." She has also edited a collection of essays entitled Brahms and the Influence of Beethoven, published as a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which explores similar themes and is 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. Her work on theorist, composer, and inventor Joseph Schillinger (active in New York in the 1930s-40s) examines Schillinger's means of marketing his work as a unique fusion of music with "science" while alienating himself from academic and classical musicians and yet becoming an influential teacher of some of the biggest names in jazz and popular music of his time. She is currently writing on Leonard Bernstein.

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Other publications include articles and reviews in journals such as 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, The Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, and Music & Letters, as well as a co-authored publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been presented at meetings of 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 she has been a featured speaker at recent events hosted by institutions including Phi Beta Kappa and the Center for Historical Keyboards at Cornell University.

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She enjoys teaching on a wide range of topics, from chamber music to film music and jazz, from "music appreciation" to music research techniques, and from the history of sound recording to the history of exoticism in music. Her teaching is driven by the aim of providing students with opportunities and resources to develop as creative, self-aware, and socially aware thinkers and communicators who can engage in critical historiography. Her hope is that students leave her classroom with an appreciation for the value of digging deep, questioning received modes of understanding, listening and speaking up, and finding connections across disciplinary and other socially constructed divides.

 

Before arriving at the University of Rochester, she held visiting faculty appointments at Central Connecticut State University, Boston University, Brown University, Wellesley College, and Williams College. She sits on the boards of directors of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, the American Brahms Society, and the Phi Beta Kappa Association of Boston; serves as an editor for College Music Symposium; and is a recent past president of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society. She holds a PhD in musicology from Brandeis University and a degree in music and mathematics from Wellesley College and trained in piano and choral singing at the New England Conservatory of Music.