Jonathan Gibson

Professor, Musicology

Ph.D. & A.M., Duke University; B.M. University of Richmond.

Jonathan Gibson specializes in music of the Baroque era, primarily the music of late seventeenth-century France. His research interests include musical aesthetics and criticism, performance practice, and the relationships between music and rhetoric. His recent publications appear in the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (“The Ends of Artifice in the Tragédies en Musique of Lully and Quinault”), the Journal of Musicology (“‘A Kind of Eloquence Even in Music’: Embracing Different Rhetorics in Late Seventeenth-Century France”) and in the book Fiori musicali: Liber amicorum Alexander Silbiger (“Hearing the Viola da Gamba in Komm, süsses Kreuz”). Dr. Gibson is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences.

At James Madison University, Dr. Gibson teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in music history, the pedagogy of music history and music appreciation, ethnomusicology, and historical performance practice. He founded and directs the University’s early music ensembles, including Madison Baroque and the Valley Collegium Musicum. He plays the viola da gamba, as well as Renaissance and Baroque recorders.