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James Sobaskie

About this Artist

James William Sobaskie earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Minnesota, as well as a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.  Today he is an associate professor at Mississippi State University, where he teaches music theory and composition.  Dr. Sobaskie serves on the Editorial Board of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, a musicological journal published by Cambridge University Press, and he has been its Book Reviews Editor since 2008.  His research focuses on Franz Schubert and Gabriel Fauré, and he has given presentations on their music in Belgium, Canada, England, France, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Scotland, as well as America.  Dr. Sobaskie also is a member of the Comité Scientifique of Œuvres complètes de Gabriel Fauré, a thirty-volume collected works project being published in Germany by Bärenreiter with the support of the French government’s cultural agency Musica Gallica.  His critical edition of Fauré’s last two compositions, the Trio pour violon, violoncelle et piano (1923) and the Quatuor pour cordes (1924), inaugurated the monument in 2010.  His essay, “Contextual Processes in Schubert’s Late Sacred Music,” appears in the book Rethinking Schubert, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton, which was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press.  With Lorraine Byrne Bodley, he guest-edited the June 2016 issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review devoted to Schubert, a sequel to the journal’s 2008 Schubert issue that he guest-edited with Susan Youens.  At present Dr. Sobaskie is editing Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert, an anthology of invited essays whose contributors represent nine countries, which will be published by Boydell & Brewer.  He also is completing a book, The Music of Gabriel Fauré: Style, Structure and the Art of Allusion, which will be published by Routledge.  While similarities and connections between Franz Schubert (1797–1828) and Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) may not seem immediately obvious – beyond their enormous and extraordinary legacies of vocal, piano, and chamber music – the early-Romantic Austrian composer and the late-Romantic/early Modern French composer actually have much in common.  For instance, both have been overshadowed by prominent peers, the richness of their repertoires has been overlooked, and each master’s artistic influence has been underestimated.  Such challenging circumstances cannot help but inspire the energetic advocacy that is shared by so many musicians, and so amply demonstrated by the Schubert Festival of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.