IU Jacobs School grad releases first solo album "...of dreams unveiled"

The woman sitting cross-legged on the piano bench is IU Jacobs School graduate Clare Longendyke — apparently taking a break from a very busy professional career.

Longendyke's just-released, first solo album has hit the No. 2 spot on Billboard's Traditional Classical Albums chart.

In an email interview, Longendyke said the album title, “…of dreams unveiled,” (yes, the all-lowercase title is intentional) is “a play on the way Claude Debussy titles his preludes, with ellipses and italics.”

She plays a lot of Debussy on the album along with works by Amy Williams and Anthony Green. The album already has been broadcast locally on WFHB and on classical music stations in Florida, Virginia, and, she said, "across the Midwest: WFMT, Chicago; WPR, Madison; WVIK Quad Cities.”

Longendyke, who lives in Fishers, said she was in Bloomington “on and off from 2011 to 2018 as a student at the Jacobs School.”

“I pursued my master’s degree with Jean-Louis Haguenauer and my doctor of music with Dr. Karen Shaw — and I graduated in a virtual ceremony during COVID!”

Since graduating, Longendyke has become widely known in concert halls around the United States. Her performances since January alone, for example, have taken her to Madison, Wisconsin; Brooklyn, New York; and Rochester, Minnesota.

Lately she’s been spending a lot of time at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology as “Artist in Residence.”

Though Longendyke does some teaching at Rose-Hulman, her role is “more about music education through performance in the school’s Discovery Music Series that presents artists from around South-Central Indiana,” she said via email.

“In the six months since my residency began, I’ve hosted and performed concerts of chamber music from the 1700s through the music of today. I gave a solo recital showcase, am performing a concert of all video game music in April and will play the Florence Price Piano Concerto with the school’s student orchestra to end the residency in May.”

Longendyke said before she arrived at Jacobs she received a bachelor's degree in music, graduating cum laude, at Boston University College of Fine Arts in 2009. And then she spent two years in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar at Ecole Normal de Musique, “where I received certificates in piano performance, chamber music, and collaborative piano.”

But back to Jacobs, she noted a certain snobbish attitude that makes some East Coasters wonder how anything remarkable can come from — of all places — south-central Indiana.

“The JSOM community is second-to-none because we all have to combat that ‘Midwest-second-tier’ stigma,” Longendyke wrote, “but we do it together, and it makes us the best.”

“Being a JSOM grad has unlocked relationships in my professional career that have allowed me to develop beyond campus, and for that I am immensely grateful.”

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Pianist Clare Longendyke releases first solo classical album