Music Faculty Publications

Defending Salamone Rossi: the transformation and justification of Jewish music in Renaissance Italy

Joshua R. Jacobson — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:35:47 PST

Jewish music: what is that?

Joshua R. Jacobson — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:45:59 PST

Some preliminary notes on a study of the Jewish choral movement

Joshua R. Jacobson — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:56:50 PST

Book review: The organ and its music in German-Jewish culture

Joshua R. Jacobson — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:14:27 PST

Ruth Crawford's "spiritual concept": the sound-ideals of an early American modernist, 1924-1930

Judith Tick — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:03:39 PST

This article investigates the musical thought and stylistic evolution of the American modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) in her formative years. It shows the relationship of style and idea to what she termed "spiritual concept": the core of her transcendental modernism. The sources of Crawford's spiritual aesthetics are Theosophy, Eastern religious philosophy, nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt Whitman. Thus Crawford drew on an eclectic legacy of ideas that had been linked in American intellectual life since the turn of the century. Documentation of her thought is based on unpublished diaries, poems, and correspondence. The mediation...

Book review: The Cambridge history of American music

Judith Tick — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:03:38 PST

Tombeau (in memory of Donald Stenberg): for violin and piano

Ronald Bruce Smith — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:22:40 PST

Tombeau (2006) was written in memory of Donald Stenberg who passed away July 10, 2004. Don was a tenor, a professor of voice and, for a good number of years, chair of the voice department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His genuine warmth and gentleness affected everyone who knew him, as did his profound love and knowledge of music and the joy that it gave him. This piece employs certain features associated with tombeaus from previous centuries. Such features include a descending stepwise figure, first presented in this piece diatonically and then later in a more chromatic context,...

Five pieces for guitar and live electronics

Ronald Bruce Smith — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:22:39 PST

Five Pieces for Guitar and Live Electronics was commissioned under a UC Discovery grant from the University of California’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Program (IUCRP) and Gibson Guitar Corporation. It was made possible through the support of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley. The aim of the commission was to incorporate into a concert piece for solo guitar the guitar centered software technology that researchers there had developed. These effects were developed in the Max/MSP environment and I make use of a number of them as well as a few other...

String quartet no. 2: "Nostalgia"

Ronald Bruce Smith — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:22:38 PST

The quartet is in four movements and is dedicated to the Del Sol String Quartet. Each movement contains references to music of the past both in their formal designs and through the use of quotation. Borrowed materials as well as references to music from all four movements of Maurice Ravel’s Quatuor à Cordes can be heard throughout the composition. The third movement, a loosely structured chaconne, also takes material from Bill Evans’ versions of My Romance and Alice in Wonderland. As can be symptomatic of the yearning for an irrecoverable past, nostalgia can corrupt the memory to long for a...

Constellation: for orchestra and live electronics

Ronald Bruce Smith — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:22:38 PST

Something suspicious (small): for bass clarinet and live electronics

Ronald Bruce Smith — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:22:36 PST

An interview with Tristan Murail

Ronald Bruce Smith — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:43:54 PST

Franz Schubert and the Vienna Synagogue

Joshua R. Jacobson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:39:34 PST

Franz Schubert is the only great composer before the twentieth century to compose a setting in Hebrew of the liturgy for the synagogue. This article examines Schubert's unique composition and places it in the context of Vienna's social, cultural, and religious life in the early nineteenth century.

Musing about Jewish music

Joshua R. Jacobson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:39:32 PST

The choral music of Salamone Rossi

Joshua R. Jacobson — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:06:05 PST

Tsen Brider: a Jewish Requiem

Joshua R. Jacobson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:03:24 PST

In 1939 a Jewish choral conductor imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp organized a clandestine choir. The choir and its conductor managed to rehearse and perform secretly for three years. Sensing that the end was near, in 1942 the ensemble was rehearsing its own "Jewish Requiem" when the deportation order arrived. Neither the conductor nor any of his singers survived, but the "Jewish Requiem" did survive. This article chronicles the origins and fate of this unique composition.

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Jewish music versus Jewish worship

Joshua R. Jacobson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:21:38 PST

Ta'amey hamikra: a closer look

Joshua R. Jacobson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:21:37 PST

Jewish women in music

Joshua Jacobson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:21:36 PST

Arnold Schoenberg and Ahad Ha‘am

Joshua R. Jacobson — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:08:53 PST