Wayne Heisler

Dr. Wayne Heisler

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

Area Coordinator of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music; Coordinator of Bachelor of Arts in Music degree program

Email: wheisler@tcnj.edu
Telephone: 609.771.2752

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

Dr. Wayne Heisler is an Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music at The College of New Jersey where his active courses are:

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 work appears in The Musical Quarterly, The Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History, ECHO: a music-centered journal, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed.), among other places.  His book The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss was published in 2009 as part of the University of Rochester Press’s Eastman Studies in Music series.  Dr. Heisler’s conference presentations include the American Musicological Society, German Studies Association, International Musicological Society, Royal Music Association (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Society for American Music.  He has been awarded grants from the German-American Fulbright Commission, Germanistic Society of America/Fulbright IIE, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).  Dr. Heisler is currently serving as an elected member of the Council of the American Musicological Society for the term 2012–14.

 

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 Taiko 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:

“Reuniting the ‘Three Hellenic Sisters’: Integrative Effects of Dance, Music, and Poetry in Choreographies of Richard Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder”  [forthcoming, 2013].

“Choreographing Schumann.”  In Rethinking Schumann, eds. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge, 329–56 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

“Maturity and Indecision in the Early Works.”  In The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans, 42–55 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

 

Articles:

“Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies and the Affirmation of Mahler’s Body, 1937–1947” [forthcoming, 2012].

“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.

Recent and upcoming presentations:

“Dancing Lieder ‘Singing’.”  Paper for a panel entitled The Lied in Performance: Text and Context.  Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, New Orleans, November 2012.

“Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies and the Affirmation of Mahler’s Body, 1937–1947.”  Dance and the Social City, 35th Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, June 2012.

“Stevie’s Voice.”  Feminist Theory and Music 11: Looking Backward, Forward & Sideways, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, September 2011.