CV here
I am a musicologist, lecturer, pianist, and music critic currently pursuing my Ph.D. 
degree in musicology at Harvard University. My dissertation entitled The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera, is co-supervised by Carolyn Abbate & Kate van Orden, with Alexander Rehding and David J. Levin as committee readers. My project takes an interdisciplinary approach in my selection of explicitly cross-cultural operas that demonstrate how the global pandemic and resurgence of decolonial thinking ushered in a watershed moment for contemporary opera and music theater. In my work, I weave together three major strands of emerging musicological thought: the centering of non-western and BIPOC perspectives in operas; site-specific staging of contemporary and canonic operas; and new transmedia aesthetics, also known as multiplatform storytelling in performance. What we could call a hypermobility turn has taken place—operas predicated on breaking barriers, hierarchies, and conventions, but far beyond more conventional strategies of unsettling, beyond swapping out musical or vocal styles, adapting contemporary news as plot material, foregrounding social issues, or choosing an unexpected performance venue. The change is more deep seated. In the twenty-first century, hypermobility describes a rich spectrum of possibilities in opera and beyond—ranging from hidden mobility engaged in creative intermedial borrowing, micro-mobility unfolding during site-specific performances, to digital mobility in live virtual opera—which carry significant aesthetic, ideological, and ethical ramifications. The concept hypermobility does cut against the disciplinary grain of “mobility studies,” most notably because specific geographical areas are not a central focus—there is often no actual geographical here or there. Rather, hypermobility captures the spontaneous diffusion of innovations in our current operatic moment, which demands alternative ways of engaging. Movements, media, and mechanisms that transgress conventional mobilities enable us to imagine otherwise (Crawley, 2016). My dissertation sketches the contours of this emergent hypermobility turn by presenting a glocal microhistory of four contemporary operas, each striving toward a different kind of operatic future while simultaneously aspiring to new forms of decolonization.
Two publications from my dissertation appear in Sound Stage Screen and CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature. The former titled, “Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods (2020-21): Site-Specific Reimaginations of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung,” is an invited article, which investigates the technological and ideological dimensions of two site-specific reimaginations of Wagner’s canonic opera in urban multi-storied garages in Detroit and Chicago. The latter titled, “Creating a Honglou meng for 21st-Century San Francisco: Musical Confluence in Bright Sheng’s Opera, Dream of the Red Chamber (2016-2022)” examines Sheng’s musicodiasporic aesthetic in his interweaving of Chinese music and poetry, and stylistic allusion to Béla Bartók, which contribute to the transnational opera’s phenomenal success in San Francisco, China, and Hong Kong. My secondary interest in film music is reflected in my chapter in The Palgrave Handbook in Comedy Cinema titled, “On and Beyond Mickey-Mousing: Revisiting Yuan Muzhi’s Scenes of City Life (1935),” which examines creative uses of comedy music in Yuan Muzhi’s film, which was produced at the height of early experimental Chinese cinema. I was also invited to contribute to a special issue in Sound Stage Screen in March 2024. That piece titled, “The Hypermobility Turn in Contemporary Opera,” investigates the impact of hypermobility on contemporary opera by engaging with two operas conceived in 2020-2021.
Beyond my dissertation, my current projects reflect my longstanding interest in crossing boundaries between the artistic and the scholarly in contemporary opera studies. My edited volume under contract with Routledge titled, New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera: The Practitioners’ Perspectives (forthcoming in 2024), is the first study that approaches contemporary opera dramaturgy from the unique perspectives of living practitioners of opera (composers, directors, singers, producers, dramaturgs). This work brings together contributions from luminaries like Pamela Z, Du Yun, Beth Morrison, Kamala Sankaram, David Little, Jay Scheib, and Noa Frenkel (among many others) to address issues concerning representations of non-Western culture on today’s operatic stage, transmedia storytelling in operas, and how the pandemic probes a complex rethinking of what it means to bring an opera into being. My second project engages in an intermedial study of polyglot musical productions (songs, musicals, music theater, operas) across stage and screen. I embrace a globally oriented perspective by interrogating how these polyglot musical productions partake in place-making in cosmopolitan settings such as Singapore, Australia, Canada, and the US.
I have presented at regional, national, and international musicology conferences, including AMS (2019, 2021, 2022), IMS (2022), TOSC@Lisbon (2023), SEM (2019), SAM (2020,2024), Music and the Moving Image (2020), and the 22nd CHIME meeting (2019). Among other awards, I have received the Deane L. Root Award in 2022 and the West Virginia University Press Award in 2019 for the best student paper at AMS chapter conferences. My research and work has been supported by multiple fellowships including the William F. Holmes/Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies from the American Musicological Society (AMS), Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music (SAM), Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship of the GSAS Kennedy, Knox, Sheldon Fellowship, Cynthia Verba Merit Fellowship (honorary), Richard F. French Term-Time Fellowship, Harry and Marjorie Ann Slim Memorial Fellowship, Victor and William Fung Fellowship, Wesley Weyman Fund, Harvard University Asia Center Conference Attendance Grant, Graduate Student Associate (GSA) Research Stipend, Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Summer Research Grant, and Richard F. French Fellowship. Recent teaching awards include the Derek Bok Center Teaching Certificate and the Derek Bok Center of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University.
An active performer and musicologist, I hold a double-degree B.M. in music history and piano performance at Oberlin Conservatory under a Dean’s Scholarship Award, and a double-degree M.A. in musicology and M.M. in piano performance at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music under a three-year Jacobs fellowship. I have held both solo and chamber piano performances in Singapore, China, and the US. At present, I serve as the Managing Editor of the opera section at The Theatre Times (https://thetheatretimes.com). At Harvard, I serve as an Affiliate of FutureSTAGE (a global research project promoted by MetaLAB at Harvard), and the Graduate Student Coordinator of the Transmedia Arts seminar series at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.
I have designed and taught multiple seminars for a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students with varying levels of music knowledge and diverse cultural backgrounds. This includes the “Music in Multimedia Art” seminar for Harvard music concentrators that I am currently teaching, and “21st-Century Contemporary Opera,” which received Harvard’s 2021 Mini-Course Award Grant. From 2018 to 2021, I was an invited lecturer to Indiana University and SUSTech to teach the survey course “Western Music History 101,” and more specialized topics like “Music of the Silk Road” and “Cultural Fusion and Musical Cosmopolitanism.” Previously at Oberlin Conservatory, I served as Charles McGuire’s music history course tutor and was also a piano teacher of the secondary piano program led by Andrea McAlister. Upon graduation, I was awarded the Carol Nott Pedagogy Prize for my teaching achievements.
Professional services to the field include serving on the Committee of Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity at American Musicological Society (AMS) from 2022 to 2024, and leading the World Music Ensemble at Harvard University from 2021 to 2022. I was previously elected to serve as the Student Representative to American Musicological Society (New England Chapter of AMS) from 2019 to 2021 as well as the 2020 Conference Chair of Harvard University Graduate Music Forum.
You can reach me at jingyizhang at g dot harvard dot edu (jingyizhang@g.harvard.edu) or zjingyi93 at yahoo dot com dot sg (zjingyi93@yahoo.com.sg)