Dr. Wayne Heisler

Associate Professor of Music (Historical and Cultural Studies in Music)

Area Coordinator of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music

 

Ph.D., Musicology, Princeton University
M.F.A., Musicology, Princeton University
M.M., Musicology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A., Music, DePaul University

 

Dr. Wayne Heisler is an Associate Professor of Music and the Coordinator of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music at The College of New Jersey where he teaches

• HON 370-02: Gender, Sexuality, and Pop Music in the 1980s
• MUS 246: Music in Global Perspective
• MUS 251: Music of Our Diverse World
• MUS 265: Music and the Stage
• MUS 452: Music from 1850 to the Present  (Writing Intensive)
• MUS 455: Issues in Music Performance Studies (Writing Intensive)

Dr. Heisler’s research and teaching interests embrace both art music and popular culture from the late 19th through 20th centuries and beyond, including opera and musical theater, Richard Strauss, collaborations between composers and dance choreographers, historiography, music ethnography, and gender and sexuality in music and dance performance.

Dr. Heisler’s articles have appeared in The Musical Quarterly, The Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History, and ECHO: a music-centered journal. His book The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss appeared in 2009 as part of the Eastman Studies in Music series published by the University of Rochester Press. Dr. Heisler has presented his research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society, Society for Dance History Scholars, and the Society for American Music, among others. He has been awarded grants from the German-American Fulbright Commission, Germanistic Society of America/Fulbright IIE, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), and is a recipient of a Support for Scholarly Activities grant (SOSA) from The College of New Jersey for the 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 academic years.

Dr. Heisler studied piano in Chicago with Dmitry Paperno and Melody Lord. His performance activities include music of the late twentieth century, especially aleatoric and “minimalist” compositions, and gamelan. Dr. Heisler is a faculty advisor for TCNJ’s Contemporary Music Ensemble and iTunes (International Tunes), a cross-cultural acapella group.

Representative publications:

Book:

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, Eastman Studies in Music (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009).

Chapters in collected volumes:

“Choreographing Schumann,” in Rethinking Schumann, eds. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

“Maturity and Indecision in the Early Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Articles:

“Kitsch and the Ballet Schlagobers,” The Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History 22/1 (Winter 2006): 38–64.

“‘To drive away all cloudy thoughts’: Heinrich Kröller’s and Richard Strauss’s 1923 Ballettsoirée and Interwar Viennese Cultural Politics,” The Musical Quarterly 88/4 (Winter 2005): 594–629.

“What Fun? Whose Fun? Cyndi Lauper (Re) Covers ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’,” ECHO: a music-centered journal 6/1 (Spring 2004): www.echo.ucla.edu/volume6-issue1/table-of-contents.html.

Upcoming presentations:

“Richard Strauss, Jugendstil, and Ballet,”  34th European Studies Conference, University of Nebraska-Omaha, October 2009.

Email: wheisler@tcnj.edu