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| A musicologist,
composer, and conductor, James Wierzbicki earned his bachelor's (University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1970) and master's (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory
of Music, 1971) degrees in clarinet performance. After completing his Ph.D.
in music theory and historical musicology at the University of Cincinnati
in 1979 (with a dissertation titled "Burlesque Opera in London: 1728-1739")
he opted to pursue a full-time career not in academia but in music journalism.
Between 1974 and 1994 he worked as chief music (and dance) critic for the
Cincinnati Post, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch; during the 1980s and '90s he was also a contributing
editor for High Fidelity/Musical America magazine and a commentator
for National Public Radio's Performance Today program. For his journalistic
work he was twice honored with ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for
Excellence in Writing about Music, and for more than a decade he served
as an officer of the Music Critics' Association of North America.
Over the last twenty years Wierzbicki has taught courses ranging from seminars in eighteenth-century aesthetics to surveys of medieval music and non-Western music at Washington University (St. Louis), the St. Louis Conservatory of Music, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Concordia University (Irvine, CA), and for the Music Critics' Association of North America he has directed or served as a faculty member at institutes in chamber music, twentieth-century opera, and Baroque performance practice. A prolific composer of music for theater and television, during the late 1990s Wierzbicki was based in Seattle, where -- along with serving as full-time father for two young daughters -- he produced music for video and multimedia productions, worked as an editor for an Internet music publisher and wrote a full-length opera based on the "Frankenstein" story. Although he continues to write on eighteenth-century topics for Opera Quarterly and other publications, Wierzbicki's current scholarly interests are focused primarily on film music. His recent articles in this field include "Wedding Bells for The Bride of Frankenstein: Symbols and Signifiers in the Music for a Classic Horror Film" (Film and Philosophy, 2001), "Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical Voice to Hollywood's Extraterrestrials" (Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2002), and "Raiders of the Lost Arc: Hollywood's Appropriation of Operatic Narrative Form" (Interdisciplinary Humanities, 2003); forthcoming articles include "Grand Illusion: The 'Storm Cloud' Music in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much" (Journal of Film Music, 2003) and "Banality Triumphant: Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films" (the Beethoven Forum, 2003). Papers delivered at recent academic conferences have ranged from gender issues in the songs of the Disney animated features to Max Weber's sociology of music. Wierzbicki has contributed a chapter titled "Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick" for a forthcoming book (Wallflower Press) on Malick's work; he is currently under contract for single-authored books on the entire spectrum of American music in the post-World War II period (Greenwood Press) and on the all-electronic score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (Scarecrow Press). Wierzbicki joined the UCI music faculty as a lecturer in the fall of 2001. |
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