Colloquium - Professor Ryan Minor

Fugues, Fugue States, and Other Operatic Contagions

Abstract

This talk is focused on the curious fugue ending Act II of Wagner’s Meistersinger.  My interest is not the historical baggage of the genre itself, but the way that the fugue serves as a nodal point bringing together contemporaneous discourses of musical mastery, crowd psychology, and the physiology of musical spectatorship.

Biography

Ryan Minor is Associate Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  His research focuses primarily on the musical and political culture of Germany in the “long” nineteenth century; his interests encompass operatic staging and dramaturgy, nationalism, and the politics of musical spectatorship in bourgeois culture.   Minor is the author of Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in 19th-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012) as well as articles and essays in Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.  He has also contributed to Franz Liszt and his World, The Oxford Handbook of Opera, 19th-Century Choral Music, and The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia.  He is Co-Executive Editor, along with David Levin, of The Opera Quarterly.