Dr. Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is Professor of Music in the Department of Music and Theatre Arts at UW-Eau Claire where he teaches courses in the history of Western art music, world music, and popular music. He received a B.A. in English from the University of Richmond and holds a Ph.D. and an M.F.A. in Musicology from Brandeis University. Before joining the UW-Eau Claire faculty, Dr. Jones taught at Brandeis and Gettysburg College.

Dr. Jones’s musicological interests range from American art and film music to jazz and rock. His dissertation presented the first extensive study of Aaron Copland's only full-length opera, The Tender Land (1954), outlining the potential the composer's final populist work holds both for understanding his aesthetic values and locating their place within American music history. His research has also investigated issues of authenticity in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, traced the educational arc of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley's early training and career in music (Current Musicology, 2006), and examined the challenges of Stan Kenton's early Artistry in Rhythm Orchestra as its leader eschewed dance music from the receding swing era to embrace concert presentations of jazz (Jazz Research Journal, 2008). “‘Catch as Catch Can’: Jazz, John Williams, & Popular Music Allusion” in John Williams: Music for Films, Television, and the Concert Stage (Brepols, 2018) explores Williams’s varied use of popular music elements within his film and television scores. His chapter in Cinema Changes: Incorporations of Jazz in the Film Soundtrack (Brepols 2019), “Dignity in the Twilight of Minstrelsy—Race, Nuance, & Aspiration in Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life," considers issues of minstrelsy in Ellington’s cinematic portrayals of race.  Dr. Jones is author of the Instructor's Manual accompanying both Jazz: Essential Listening (W.W. Norton, 2019) and the second edition of its parent text, Jazz, by Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins. He is also a contributor to the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press).

Additional projects concern the life and music of singer Jo Stafford, social activism in the music of Stevie Wonder, formative stylistic influences upon The Police, and the inventive approaches of Sun Ra. Dr. Jones has shared his work at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Annual Leeds International Jazz Conference, and the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini.