My name is Ryan Ebright, and I serve as an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Bowling Green State University. My research focuses on opera, song, and intersections of music and drama, with an emphasis on 20th-century and contemporary opera, minimalism, and 19th-century Lieder. My scholarship and writings have appeared in the New York Times and NewMusicBox, the journal American Music, and the book Rethinking Reich. A forthcoming article in Cambridge Opera Journal examines the use of electroacoustic sound design in John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic. I present research papers regularly at national and international conferences, and have given pre-concert lectures and public talks for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toledo Symphony, and WGTE Public Media.
I am currently working on a book titled Making American Opera after “Einstein,” which centers on the negotiation of cultural politics, artistic innovation, and the politics of institution and genre in the creation of new American operas from the 1980s to the present. I present both the visual and sonic as negotiations of these internal and external factors, in case studies ranging from Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and Anthony Davis’s X to Meredith Monk’s Atlas and Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar. I completed my Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014, and I also hold degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and Westmont College. At BGSU I lead courses on opera, chamber music, symphonic music, music appreciation, and 20th- and 21st-century music, and I work closely with students in the DMA in Contemporary Music program. I also serve as the Secretary for the Society for Minimalist Music, and in 2019 I will begin serving a three-year term as Editor of the Bulletin of the Society for American Music. In addition to my research and teaching, I maintain an active profile as a performer of contemporary, early, and sacred music. I tweet occasionally: @ryan_ebright |