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Sondheim's Concepts - Company and Sunday in the Park

When
Saturday, July 09, 2022
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Location
Berkshire Museum, 39 South St, Pittsfield, MA 01201
Spaces left
160

Registration

Berkshire Museum Members – $10.00
Non-members/general public – $15.00
OLLI at BCC members – $10.00
Student/ Staff/ Faculty of BCC
WIC/ EBT/ ConnectorCare Card Holders

The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents
Professor W. Anthony Sheppard on

Sondheim's Concepts - Company and Sunday in the Park with George

Saturday, July 9 at 11:00 am EDT

In-person at the Berkshire Museum

39 South Street, Pittsfield, Mass. 01201

Online registration is closed.

Payment accepted at the door; cash and checks preferred.

Sondheim consistently claimed that the label "concept musical" was a bogus term, given that all musicals have ideas shaping their structure and songs. However, Sondheim was being modest, as very few other musicals have such striking and novel ideas as his. Many of his musicals developed from ideas that radically shaped and structured the show in ways that dramatically deviated from Broadway musical norms. More astonishingly, despite their rather cerebral and bold concepts, his musicals consistently move us deeply, as they grapple with intense human emotions and relationships. In considering his long and celebrated career, Company and Sunday in the Park with George stand out as unmatched exemplars of the full capacity of the Broadway musical.

W. Anthony Sheppard is Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College where he teaches courses in twentieth-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 first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, received the Kurt Weill Prize, his article on Madam Butterfly and film earned the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, an article on World War II film music was honored with the Alfred Einstein Award by the American Musicological Society, and "Puccini and the Music Boxes" received the AMS H. Colin Slim Award. His most recent book, entitled Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, appeared in 2019 and received the AMS Music in American Culture Award and the SAM Irving Lowens Book Award, and his edited volume, Sondheim in Our Time and His, appeared in 2022. Sheppard's research has been supported by the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, the ACLS, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and as Series Editor of AMS Studies in Music. In recognition of "excellence in teaching," Williams College named Sheppard the John Hyde Teaching Fellow for 2020-2023.

Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC and Berkshire Museum members, and $15 for the general public. Admission is free for Berkshire Community College students, youth 17 and under, and those holding WIC, EBT/SNAP, or ConnectorCare cards.

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