He/Him/His

Director of Performing Arts & Associate Professor, Music
Co-Chair

Music

Ryan Raul Bañagale is Director of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of music at Colorado College. He offers classes on a range of American music topics, including musical theatre, jazz, popular music, folk music, and media studies. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with support from the American Musicological Society's AMS-50 and Howard Mayer Brown Fellowships. His first book, Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2014), focuses on the ongoing-and surprising-life of Gershwin's iconic Rhapsody in Blue over the course of the ninety years since its inception. He is co-editor of "We Didn't Start the Fire": Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington Books) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies (Oxford University Press). He currently sits on the editorial board of the George Gershwin Critical Edition and will be editing at least three separate arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue. His research also appears in journals such as Jazz Perspectives and the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Publications

Forthcoming:

• Critical Edition of Rhapsody in Blue (Jazz-Band Arrangement), George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, European American Music and Schott International (2019).
• The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, Oxford University Press (2022).

Books:

• Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Billy Joel Studies: Music, History, and Culture, co-edited with Joshua Duchan, Lexington Press (2020).

Selected Articles:

• "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. (New York: 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.