Musciology Lecture, Raymond Knapp, "Take Me to the World": Lessons Learned from Sondheim’s 90th Birthday Celebration

Musciology Lecture with Raymond Knapp

Take Me to the World: Lessons Learned from Sondheim’s 90th Birthday Celebration

Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023

4 p.m.

First floor conference room, Contemporary Arts Center

A month and a half into the pandemic lockdown, on April 26, 2020, Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday was celebrated in an online event hosted by Raúl Esparza: Take Me to the World, a virtual concert of (mostly) celebrities from the worlds of Broadway and film musicals singing Sondheim songs, interspersed with spoken birthday greetings and tributes. Due to technical difficulties, the event got underway well over an hour late while Sondheim fans waited impatiently, texting and Tweeting alternative websites and appropriate Sondheim lyrics to each other. I want to consider this tribute/birthday event contextually, more holistically, in an attempt to understand how and why it mattered so much to so many, as a site to celebrate and rediscover Sondheim, to connect to others celebrating and rediscovering his songs and their ever-renewing significance, to make sense of an extended, worldwide moment of disconnection, and, perhaps, to renew a desperately missed sense of human communion through song.

Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities at UCLA, where he directs the Center for Musical Humanities and chairs the Department of Musicology. His books include The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (winner, Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (co-edited with Mitchell Morris and Stacy Wolf), and Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical with Jessica Sternfeld and Holley Replogle-Wong.