"Disruptor on the Podium: Politics, Race and Sexuality in the Career of Leonard Bernstein" Beginning with his time at Harvard (and his participation in a production of Marc Blitztein’s The Cradle Will Rock), politics were to have an outsize influence on Bernstein’s musical persona. This panel will explore the ways Bernstein’s forward-thinking political positions shaped his music and career, and the world of classical music. This is the second of two panel discussions presented by the BSO as part of the Bernstein centennial celebration.
Carol J. Oja is the William Powell Mason Professor of Music. Professor Oja's research focuses on 20th-century American musical traditions. Her book, *Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920's* (2000), won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Other books include *Copland and his World* (co-edited with Judith Tick, 2005); *Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds*; *A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock*; and *American Music Recordings: A Discography of 20th-Century U.S. Composers*. She is at work on a book provisionally titled *Leonard Bernstein and Broadway*, and she is past-president of the Society for American Music. During 2008-09, she is a fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.
Daniel Callahan is a musicologist who focuses on choreomusicality, or the interrelationship between music and dance. His teaching and research engage theater/performance, cinema/media, and gender/sexuality studies. He comes to Boston College from the University of Chicago, where he was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music and the Humanities in the College. He received his PhD from Columbia University, where he was supported by a 2012 Whiting Dissertation Fellowship and a Beinecke Scholarship.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies. An ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States, Shelemay's current research is on music and migration. In 2011 she edited (with Steven Kaplan) a special double volume of the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, titled "Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora," and the third edition of her textbook, Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2015. Shelemay has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and many other agencies, as well as major prizes for her publications. Currently, Kay Kaufman Shelemay serves as Chair of the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.