Colorado College Music Department co-chair and associate professor Ryan Bañagale '00 was recently elected to the Society for American Music Board of Trustees.

Bañagale will serve a three-year term as a member-at-large on the board. He has been an active member of SAM for nearly 20 years. He first attended the SAM conference in Tempe in 2003, and he has since been Student Forum Co-Chair (2005-07), a member of the Web Committee (2006-09), SAM Bulletin Book Reviews Editor (2013-16), and Chair of the Education Committee (2018-20). He is currently a member of the Lowens Book Award Committee (2021-24). He received SAM Student Travel Grants early in his career, as well as the H. Earle Johnson Subvention in support of the publication of his first book.

"I am honored to serve as a member-at-large for the society that has profoundly shaped my career," Bañagale said.

His research explores the realm of Arrangement Studies, having applied such approaches to a variety of American music subjects and genres. He is the author of Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford, 2014) and co-editor of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington, 2020). Presently he is editing the Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies.

Bañagale’s critical edition of the 1924 arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue was published as a part of the George and Ira Gershwin Initiative (Schott International, 2022). He is on the editorial board of the Gershwin Critical Edition, Open Access Musicology, and serves as Digital and Multimedia Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His current research project considers the music and career of Ben Folds.