James Hepokoski

Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music 

James Hepokoski, B.S. University of Minnesota at Duluth, Ph.D. Harvard University, faculty member at Yale since 1998: Your legendary lectures and penetrating prose have unlocked the grand tradition of classical music for generations of students and scholars. In studies of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers from Verdi to Sibelius, Beethoven to Elgar, you have left no note unturned in your deeply humane exegetical work. 

After “writing the book” on Verdi’s Otello, you did it again with Falstaff, and once more with Sibelius’s Fifth, but you were just getting started. The extraordinary book that occupied so much of your time and teaching at Yale, Elements of Sonata Theory, stands as one of the monumental accomplishments of American musicology. It spans the divide between musicology and music theory in characteristically Hepokoskian fashion, and forms a headwater of the burgeoning subdiscipline known as “New Formenlehre.” The Elements is stuffed with exciting new ideas, terms, and concepts that quickly became basic facts of the discipline. You and your coauthor Warren Darcy place nearly the entire standard repertory of classical music on stage, each symphony, concerto, and sonata set in dialogue with others, illuminating a centuries-long conversation among composers about how to turn raw time into drama through music alone. Though this conversation was wordless, written in the language of musical tonality, your inimitable rhetoric and ear for le mot juste has rendered it legible to all who would understand the secrets and powers of the sonata. 

You have been endlessly generous with these linguistic gifts, carefully reading mountains of prose written by your colleagues and students and offering pointed, memorable, and constructive critique. Attention from the “Prose Bear,” as you came to be known, benefited not only your fellow Yale citizens, but the authors and readers of 19th-Century Music, a journal renowned for its high literary standards that thrived under your leadership from 1992 through 2005. Your interest in the craft of writing was matched by an insistence on methodological rigor and skepticism about ideology. 

With a musical career that began in the trumpet section of the United States Air Force Band, you nurtured a lifelong interest in American music. Your deep knowledge of the collections at Yale was the basis for a graduate seminar on Charles Ives, Cole Porter, and the blues that trained several generations of students in the art of archival research and the delightful complexities of the early twentieth-century American musical landscape—not to mention the countless ribald lyric variations on “Anything Goes” tucked away in those acid-free boxes in the Gilmore Music Library. 

Your students have recognized your teaching with the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize (2010). Your discipline has recognized your scholarship with the Wallace Berry Award (2008). And your colleagues have recognized your service by asking you to cap your Yale career with two terms at the helm as department chair. You showed the world how Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven created a language of forms and deformations that became a platform for a century’s worth of masterworks. While you have returned to the homeland, as all Minnesotans must, you created a formidable template for musical scholarship at Yale with which your colleagues will be in dialogue for many years to come.