Ryan Gourley is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of global music history and cultural mobility studies. His research explores issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in Northeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. He currently serves as the Secretary of the Music Study Group of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the webmaster of the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS). He is currently the Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study.
Ryan’s dissertation project critically examines the Russian colonization of Manchuria, focusing on the diverse musical practices and media forms that emerged alongside geopolitical conflict in the region. Chapters delve into early recordings made during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), questions of musical authenticity during the Russian Civil War, Soviet musical tours during the Sino-Soviet War of 1929, and the aesthetics of Russian diasporic musical performance in Imperial Japanese Manchukuo. His research has been generously supported by the Institute of Slavic, Eastern European & Eurasian Studies Research Fellowship (2023 & 2019), The Long-Ling Hsiao Chu and Chao Chi Chu Fellowship in Chinese Studies (2022), The John L Simpson Global, International & Area Studies ABD Fellowship (2021), Institute of East Asian Studies Graduate Fellowship (2021), The Apgar Award from the Department of Music (2021), and the Distinguished Fellows Travel Grant from the Graduate Division (2018).
Since 2019, Ryan has overseen a collection of 3000+ rare recordings as the Curator of the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco. His project to catalog, preserve, and digitize the collection was funded in part by the National Recording Preservation Foundation and an ASEEES Internship Grant. A select portion of the digitized collection now lives online at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/mrcsf-music).
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Research Interests
Music in the Russian Far East, China, and Japan; Imperialism and Conflict Studies, Cultural Mobility and Network Studies, Phonography and Media Studies, Soviet and Post-Soviet Aesthetics, Diaspora Studies, Digital Humanities, and Soviet Jazz.
Publications
2024. “Soviet Jazz on American Vinyl: Consuming Diasporic Jazz at Home'' in The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies, edited by Anthony Bruce Johnson, Ádám Havas, and David Horn. Routledge.
2024. “A Discography of Basile Kibalchich (Дискография Василия Кибальчича).” Временник зубовского института. No 2 (45). pp. 205-224.
(Forthcoming) “Bone Music by Stephen Coates” Book Review. Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
Teaching at UC Berkeley
MUSIC 139: “Sounds of Soviet Collapse”
Instructor of Record: Summer 2024
MUSIC R1B: “Music and State Socialism”
Instructor of Record: Fall 2022
MUSIC 26: “Music in American Cultures”
Instructor of Record: Summer 2020
Head Graduate Student Instructor: Spring 2023
Graduate Student Instructor: Summer 2022, Fall 2021, Summer 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
MUSIC 27: “Introduction to Western Art Music”
Head Graduate Student Instructor: Spring 2022
Graduate Student Instructor: Spring 2020
MUSIC 80: “Studies of Musics of the World”
Head Graduate Student Instructor: Spring 2021
Graduate Student Reader: Spring 2022, Spring 2023
MUSIC 98BC / 198BC & ENGLISH 198BC: “Berkeley Connect” (Undergraduate Mentorship)
Graduate Mentor: Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024
