“I have always felt that the reason we have been and still are successful is because of the faculty-they know everybody and they’re well known in the profession.” Gwyn Richards, who stepped down as dean just last year after 20 years at the helm, notes that many of the Jacobs School’s current faculty have come to teach at Jacobs as a second career after they’ve experienced success in the wider world of music. Students found out, ‘If I go there, I really will have a chance to work with this person.’” When we were able to find and appoint people of this quality it really set the school apart. “It generally turns out that what draws students is a particular teacher who is working in trombone or French horn or oboe. “The quality of the school is determined by those important faculty members who were outstanding in their own fields and then, when appointed to the faculty of the School of Music, gave it its reputation,” says Charles Webb, dean of the school for nearly a quarter century beginning in 1973. Percussion professor Richard Johnson, the first Black faculty member in any IU school. Some of those associated with the school are reluctant to name individuals on the basis of celebrity-the most famous or iconic really depend on the interests and passions of the person you ask. The Jacobs School of Music faculty is filled with luminaries-each one a bright light within the constellation of a particular field of study or the mastery of a certain instrument. “I think once you actually step outside of that zone, then you realize how special Bloomington is, and that the music school is, without question, one of the best in the world.” “Bloomington is a special place in the sense that there’s an electricity in the air, there’s a creative excitement and the same sort of energy you would encounter in a city like New York or Paris or Berlin,” she continues. Whether it was the opportunity to see live Baroque music or jazz played here, or the lessons she began at age 5-long before entering as a college student and Wells Scholar in the late 1990s, “growing up with that sort of artistic, creative exposure is just- it’s a thrill.”
“It was like a second home for me,” she says. Grammy Award–nominated jazz violinist Sara Caswell, now based in New York City, grew up in Bloomington, entrenched in the School of Music where her father, Austin, was a professor of musicology for 30 years.
Bloomington native and Grammy Award–nominated jazz violinist Sara Caswell grew up entrenched in the IU School of Music.
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