Please join us for the first Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium of the 2025-2026 academic year. Our featured speaker at the colloquium is Jeff Linden. Mr. Lunden is a freelance arts reporter and producer and a theatre composer. His stories have been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, as well as on other public radio programs. He has produced more than a dozen documentaries on musical theater and Tin Pan Alley for NPR covering such luminaries as George and Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen and Jule Styne. Lunden has won several awards, including the Gold Medal from the New York Festival International Radio Broadcasting Awards and a CPB Award. As a composer, Lunden has written the score for the musical adaptation of Arthur Kopit's Wings (book and lyrics by Arthur Perlman), which won the 1994 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Other works include Another Midsummer Night, Once on a Summer's Day, Swift as Desire, and adaptations of The Little Prince and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for Theatreworks/USA. Oberlin Musicology Professor Jamie O’Leary will moderate the colloquium.
About the Colloquium Series
The Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium is named in honor of Richard Murphy, an erstwhile colleague much revered and beloved for his knowledge and inimitable style of teaching. Professor Murphy died in 1993 after 32 years at Oberlin, from 1946 to 1978. Today's colloquium was begun in 1992 by Professor Claudia Macdonald, originally to foster an on-campus exchange of ideas on music between colleagues from both the Conservatory and the College. Five years later, in 1997, we expanded the series to include outside speakers as well.
