Please join us for the first Richard Murphy Musicology Colloquium of the 2026-2027 Academic year in Bibbins 223. Our featured speaker will be will W. Anthony Sheppard, who is the Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College. There, he teaches courses in 20th and 21st-century music, opera, popular music, and Asian music. He earned his B.A. at Amherst College and his M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. His Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater received the Kurt Weill Prize and Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination received the AMS Music in American Culture Award and the SAM Irving Lowens Book Award. For “excellence in teaching,” Williams named Sheppard the John Hyde Teaching Fellow and awarded him the Nelson Bushnell ’20 Prize.
His paper is entitled “Staging the Countertenor in Twenty-First Century Opera,” and will explore countertenor roles in operas by John Corigliano, Huang Ruo, Thomas Adès, Shara Nova, and Daniel Bernard Roumain, before concluding with an example of operatic pop from the Eurovision Song Contest. As these examples will attest, the countertenor voice continues to spark multivalent meanings.
Professor James 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.
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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. Restrooms are located in Bibbins Hall.
