UCLA professor kicks off musicology lectures

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

The first in the Dana School of Music’s new musicology lecture series will be 4 p.m. Friday in Bliss Recital Hall with Tamara Levitz of UCLA.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored in part by the Ohio Humanities Council.

Levitz is a professor of musicology at the University of California Los Angeles.

She has published widely on transnational modernism in the 1920s and ’30s, with a focus on music in Germany, Cuba and France.

Her lecture, “Resurrecting the Past: The Politics of 1930s Neoclassicism,” will explore the political motivations for Igor Stravinsky’s turn to a neoclassical style in the music he wrote as an migr in 1930s France.

She will focus on how Stravinsky as a neoclassicist envisioned the past and future in his melodrama “Pers phone,” and how his decisions about style related to contemporaneous debates about the Russian revolution, religion and migr culture in France.

Director of the lecture series is Ewelina Boczkowska, assistant professor of music history at Youngstown State University.

dana Lecture series

Upcoming musicology lectures will include:

Brooks Toliver of the University of Akron, Feb. 10.

Mary E. Davis of Case Western Reserve University, in the spring.

Peter J. Burkholder of Indiana University, Oct. 14, 2011.