(back to faculty list)

Jack Boss
(541) 346-5654
jfboss@uoregon.edu

Jack Boss is associate professor of music theory and composition at the University of Oregon. He received B.Mus. and M.Mus. degrees in composition from Ohio State University in 1979 and 1981, and the Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University in 1991. At Yale, his teachers included Allen Forte, David Lewin, and Claude Palisca. His doctoral dissertation, advised by Allen Forte, was titled "An Analogue to Developing Variation in a Late Atonal Song of Arnold Schoenberg." It shows that motives in Schoenberg's song "Seraphita," Op. 22, No. 1, are controlled by processes strikingly similar to Schoenberg's notions of "developing variation" and "musical idea."

Boss's articles may be found in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Online, and Intégral. He is presently working on a survey of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music for the Yale University Press Composers of the Twentieth Century series. Like his dissertation, most of his publications deal with motivic structure and large-scale coherence in Schoenberg's music. Other articles consider motivic processes in Beethoven's piano sonatas and parallels between text and musical structure in the music of Bernard Rands. Boss has also given a large number of scholarly presentations throughout the U.S., England and Ireland on different aspects of Schoenberg's music and theory.

Boss has written a number of solo piano and chamber compositions, which have been performed at composers guild concerts (such as the Cincinnati Composers Guild) as well as colleges and universities around the US.

Before coming to the University of Oregon, Boss taught at Brigham Young University for three years (1992-95), Ball State University for one year (1991-92), and Yale University for one year (1990-91). He served as undergraduate theory coordinator at BYU and also coordinated the freshman theory and aural skills program at Yale. His courses at the University of Oregon include undergraduate form and analysis, Schenkerian analysis, post-tonal analysis, the history of music theory in the 19th and 20th centuries, graduate 20th-century music history, graduate seminars on topics including Schoenberg's vocal music and neo-Riemannian analysis, and an undergraduate composition course that integrates the theory of late 19th and early 20th-century music with composition.

Boss is involved in professional service at the national and regional levels. He was reviews editor for Music Theory Online, the Society for Music Theory's electronic journal, from 2001-2006 and served as a member of the SMT's Professional Development Committee from 1995-2000. He was reviews editor, associate editor, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Music Theory from 1989 to 1991, and has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy since 2005. He has been president of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis since 2003, and has helped determine their programs for numerous meetings. He has also served on program committees for the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory.