Erica Scheinberg, assistant professor of music at Lawrence University and visiting assistant professor of Music, will give a public lecture titled "Different Trains: Kurt Weill's Railroads on Parade".

Professor Scheinberg received a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, titled “Music and the Technological Imagination in the Weimar Republic: Media, Machines and the New Objectivity,” sought to illuminate the relationship between music and technology in Germany after the First World War. Ms. Scheinberg’s graduate study was supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and a UCLA Chancellor’s Fellowship. She has presented numerous papers at regional and national conferences, including several papers on the music of Kurt Weill and others on topics relating to mechanical and machine music. Her research and teaching interests include Modernist music, American music, the history of recorded sound, and archival studies. In addition to her training as a musicologist, Ms. Scheinberg holds a master’s degree in library science and a certificate in archives, records management, and preservation from Queens College of the City University of New York. She has worked as a music reference librarian and cataloger, and interned at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where she created finding aids for archival collections in the Music Division.

This event is free and open to the campus and community.

Abstract:  Just a few years after immigrating to the United States, the "formerly German" composer Kurt Weill produced a musical score for Railroads on Parade, an elaborate open-air pageant celebrating the history of the railroad, presented four times daily at the New York World's Fair in both the 1939 and 1940 seasons. The pageant, sponsored by over two dozen railroad companies, featured a cast of 250 actors and dancers and showcased over a dozen real trains, which crossed the stage on tracks. Although Railroads on Parade has received very little scholarly attention, I view the work as central to our understanding of Weill's American career and American identity. In my presentation I introduce and interpret the music of the pageant, focusing on Weill's inclusion of traditional folk tunes. Like the railroad, a symbol of westward expansion and progress that seemed to be losing its relevance in the age of the automobile, the pageant presented American folksong as both an object of nostalgia and a current source of national pride.