The American Musical on Stage and Screen: An Interdisciplinary Extravaganza

On October 12-14, 2007, the Department of Musicology hosted a first of its kind conference, The American Musical on Stage and Screen: An Interdisciplinary Extravaganza. Organized by Musicology professors Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, along with Stacy Wolf (Theater, UT Austin), the conference brought together four dozen first-rank scholars on the musical from three countries and a variety of academic disciplines, including musicology, ethnomusicology, theater, cinema studies, music, literature, communications, gender studies, Jewish studies, and dance. The plenary and keynote speakers were also distributed among several fields: Richard Dyer (Film Studies, King’s College, London), David Savran (Theater, CUNY Graduate Center), Rose Rosengard Subotnik (Musicology, Brown), and D.A. Miller (English, Berkeley).

The organizers drew upon the rich resources of UCLA and Los Angeles, arranging a number of special events that were scheduled as part of the conference. The Music Department and the School of Arts and Architecture mounted an entirely new production (Loesser’s More) in Schoenberg’s Popper Theater, based on the songs of Frank Loesser. The Music Library and Young Research Library’s Performing Arts Special Collections mounted an exhibit of archival materials related to the musical in Powell Library’s Rotunda. The Department of Theater and the School of Theater, Film and Television screened a program of rare footage from their archives in the James Bridge Theater (Melnitz Hall). And the Institute of the American Musical screened a sampling of the Ray Knight films, documenting Broadway shows from the early 1930s to the 1960s.

The heart of the conference consisted of a series of six Roundtable Sessions, with each session led by a panel of six scholars, including a graduate student. Panelists spoke briefly on the roundtable topic before opening the discussion to the audience. Topics addressed included race and ethnicity, performance issues, cultural prestige, startexts and voices, gender and sexuality, and historical perspectives. Although most of the invitees are leading scholars in their respective fields, this was the first time many of them had met their counterparts in the other disciplines, and they embraced enthusiastically the opportunity for discussion across disciplinary boundaries.

The conference received an unusually broad spectrum of institutional support at UCLA. Three Deans provided the major funding, from the Division of the Humanities (College of Letters and Science), the School of Arts and Architecture, and the School of Theater, Film and Television. Other funding at UCLA came from a variety of Centers and Departments: Comparative Literature, English, Ethnomusicology, Film, Television, and Digital Media, LGBTS, Music, Musicology, Performing Studies, and Theater. Besides organizing and sponsoring the event, Musicology provided both staff support and a phalanx of graduate and undergraduate student volunteers. More information about the conference and its participants may be found at www.musicology.ucla.edu/conferences/musical/.