He/Him/His

Associate Professor, Chair
Chair, Interim Director of the Crown Center, ACM-Mellon Leadership Fellow in the Office of the Dean of the Faculty

Music

Ryan Raul Bañagale is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Colorado College, where he also serves as Director of the Crown Center for Teaching. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Washington, and Colorado College. His research explores the realm of Arrangement Studies, having applied such approaches to a variety of American music subjects and genres. He is the author of Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford, 2014) and co-editor of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington, 2020). Presently he is editing the "Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies." Ryan’s critical edition of the 1924 arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue was published as the first volume of the George and Ira Gershwin Initiative (Schott International, 2022). He is on the editorial board of the Gershwin Critical Edition, Open Access Musicology, and serves as Digital and Multimedia Editor for the "Journal of the American Musicological Society." His current research project considers the music and career of Ben Folds.

Ryan is the former Director of Performing Arts at CC. In this faculty administrator role he amplified the role of the arts in the academic mission of the college, supporting the collaborative and creative impulses of the campus and community. Between the endeavors of the academic arts departments, the innovative co-curricular student groups, and the expansive programming of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, he facilitated the cross-disciplinary connections that remain an essential component of the liberal arts experience.

Publications

Forthcoming:

• “Arranging Orientalism for Whiteman,” in Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture, University of Illinois Press (2024).
• The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, Oxford University Press (2025).

Books:

• Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon, Oxford University Press (2014).
• Billy Joel Studies: Music, History, and Culture, co-edited with Joshua Duchan, Lexington Press (2020).
• Rhapsody in Blue for Solo Piano and Jazz Band (The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition), Schott Music (2023).

Selected Essays:

• "The Afterlife of Rhapsody in Blue," The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin, Anna Harwell Celenza, ed., Cambridge University Press (2019).
• "United Airlines and Rhapsody in Blue," The OUPblog Tenth Anniversary Book: Ten Years of Academic Insights for the Thinking World, Alice Northover, ed., Oxford University Press (2015), 115-118.
• "Rewriting the Narrative One Arrangement at a Time: Duke Ellington and Rhapsody in Blue," Jazz Perspectives 6/1-2 (2012), 5-27.
• "Isaac Goldberg: Assessing Agency in American Music Biography," American Music Review 34/2 (2010), 8-9, 15.
• "'Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves': Bernstein's Formative Relationship with Rhapsody in Blue," Journal of the Society for American Music 3/1 (2009), 47-66.
• Review of George Gershwin: His Life and Work by Howard Pollack, Journal of the Society for American Music 3/3 (August 2009), 370-374.
• "You Are My Sunshine: The Recorded Lineage of an American Folk Song," Musicological Explorations 6 (Spring 2005), 7-24.