Jacob Wilkinson’s work explores ways of interacting critically with musical and literary history through the medium of sound. He is primarily interested in engaging with works of the past that grapple with questions of self and consciousness. Beyond this central concern, his influences, though disparate, are connected by a definite web of historical resonance across centuries. His pieces often draw from the exceedingly rich tradition of American modernist poetry, particularly the work of Hilda Doolittle (HD). Like HD, Jacob is inspired by the rich cultural and musical history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the town where he took piano and composition lessons as a teenager and home of the Bach Choir, Moravian Music Foundation, and Moravian Archives. He shares with several American modernist writers (Ezra Pound and WS Merwin foremost among them) a fascination with 12th- and 13th-century vernacular song and its role in the invention and expression of the modern subject, a topic discussed in recent literary criticism by scholars such as Sarah Kay and Simon Gaunt. In Jacob’s recent work, music of the Middle Ages or Renaissance frequently serves as a mirror or foil by which to observe contemporary conceptions of self and soul. Though often richly allusive, his music strives to communicate an immediate psychological message that transcends any particular sense of time and place, inviting listeners to join in the process of discovery but not requiring any foreknowledge of the material from which it draws. He engages as often with texts that inspire him as with those problematic from contemporary viewpoints, as evidenced by his most recent project, The Revolt of the Timid, a cello sonata written after/against a particularly troubling and often ignored passage of Kenneth Rexroth’s The Dragon and the Unicorn, composed for members of the Alluvium Ensemble in New Orleans.