Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Elkus, Jonathan
- Extent:
- 2 legal size document boxes 7 oversize legal document boxes 3 flat storage boxes 1 oversize storage boxes
- Language:
- English.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
The collection includes music manuscripts and proofs as well as printed music. It includes concert programs and production notes of performances. It also includes a small collection of personal correspondence, offprint articles and related documents on friends and colleagues. There are some documents on the Cal Band, concert programs, and sound recordings by UC students and groups. A scrapbook documents Elkus's theatrical and musical productions during his years at Cal.
There are nine series: Music Compositions, Correspondence and other documents, Concerts and Performances, College Class Notes and Assignments, UC Marching Band, Other Organizations, Sound Recordings, Posters, and Miscellany.
- Biographical / historical:
-
Jonathan Britton Elkus (b. San Francisco, CA, August 8, 1931). Composer, arranger, editor, and teacher. He studied composition with Charles Cushing and William Denny at the University of California, Berkeley (BA 1953), with Ernst Bacon and Leonard Ratner at Stanford University (MA 1957), and with Darius Milhaud at Mills College (1957). He taught at Lehigh University from 1957 to 1973 and became director of music at Cape Cod Academy in 1979. He has been guest conductor with concert bands throughout the USA.
As an editor, Elkus has been closely associated with the music of Charles Ives. He is editor of the Ives Society's critical edition of the Robert Browning Overture and is the author of Charles Ives and the American Band Tradition (1974/R1975). A vital interest in extending the repertory of concert bands has resulted in a number of compositions and numerous transcriptions, including Ives's A Son of a Gambolier and The Circus Band, and Berlioz's Grande Symphonie funébre et triomphale. Elkus's musical vocabulary draws on several 20th-century idioms, resulting in a highly individual style with strong definition of pitch and chord centers. --New Grove Dictionary of American Music
Jonathan Elkus presently teaches at the University of California, Davis, and with his wife, Mickey, runs the Overland Music Distributors in Albany, California.
- Physical location:
- For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Access and use
- Location of this collection:
-
Jean Gray Hargrove Music LibraryBerkeley, CA 94720-6000, US
- Contact:
- (510) 642-2623