Professor Larry Stempel of Fordham University will present “A Broadway Show by Any Other Name: What’s Really in a Musical’s Title?” as part of the Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium Series in Bibbins 223.
In this talk, Stempel will examine how the way we name things tends to determine how we understand the things we name. In politics, for example, some call the events of January 6, 2021 a “love fest,” others a “protest,” still others an “insurrection.” So, too, do names work in the arts. This lecture unpacks problems that names that take the form of titles pose in different arts. It focuses on two Broadway musicals by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein—the well-known Oklahoma! and the not so well-known Allegro—to ask what roles their titles have played and continue to play in determining how these shows are understood.
About Larry Stempel
Larry Stempel is a professor emeritus of music and American studies at Fordham University, where he taught for more than forty years. He received his doctorate in music theory from the University of Pennsylvania, after pursuing studies over a range of fields from philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, to orchestral conducting at the Juilliard School. While he served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile, he became principal conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of La Serena. He was a member of Lehman Engel’s BMI Musical Theater Workshop when he began to research and write his comprehensive study Showtime: A History of the Broadway Music Theater. The book has won several scholarly awards although it sorely disappointed its reviewer in The New York Times who found it “a worthwhile endeavor, even if it doesn’t leave much room for jokes.”
About the Colloquium Series
The Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium was begun in 1992 by Professor Claudia Macdonald to foster an exchange of ideas on music between colleagues in both the Conservatory and the College. The series was expanded in 1997 to include outside speakers as well, and named in honor of Richard Murphy, who taught music history at Oberlin from 1946 to 1978, and was much revered and beloved by his students. He died in 1993.
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Conservatory visitors are asked to enter the complex through either Bibbins Hall’s east entrance (off College Place) or the Conservatory Lounge’s west entrance (off S. Professor St., adjacent to the Conservatory Pond). All other entrances will be closed to the public.
