INSTITUTE AND DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE
Historical Performance at Jacobs offers students the highest standard of instrumental and vocal training along with a thorough grounding in the academic reference tools of the profession – comprehensive theoretical, critical, historiographical and practical skills: to study, interpret, and perform period-specific music of the past millennium through to the early twentieth century.
Since its founding 40 years ago by Thomas Binkley in 1980, the Historical Performance Institute (established as the Early Music Institute) has been the pioneering, leading program of its kind in the United States. Its six full-time and ten part-time faculty have exerted a defining influence on the profession. Today, the rosters of university faculties and leading period instrument and vocal ensembles are replete with JSoM-HPI alumni who continue to make significant contributions to the field as vocalists and instrumentalists; as soloists, educators, administrators, advocates, and founders of new ensembles and performance organizations.
In addition to a comprehensive core curriculum in historical performance, students benefit from a wealth of interdisciplinary resources across the Indiana University Bloomington campus:
- The William and Gayle Cook Music Library - one of the largest music research libraries in the world.
- The Lilly Library - the rare books, manuscripts, and special collections library of the Indiana University libraries, Bloomington.
- The Medieval Studies Institute - draws from twenty departments across the IU campus; a resource for the study of Medieval cultures from the fifth- to the fifteenth centuries.
- IU Center for Renaissance Studies - a multi-disciplinary program bringing together research focusing on the fourteenth- to the seventeenth centuries.
- Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature - combines the fields of Music Theory and Historical Musicology; collaborates regularly with institutions throughout the United States and abroad.
- IU Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies - brings together twenty affiliated faculty members from eight departments across the IU campus.
- Oustanding Musicology and Music Theory department faculties at the Jacobs School of Music.
- Latin American Music Center - the first institution of its kind in the United States, and a periodic collaborator with the HPI in the field of colonial music studies.
- Project Jumpstart - The Jacobs School's flagship program in entrepreneurship and career development, preparing students in advance for the professional world.