Hannah Lewis, associate professor of musicology at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, presents "Nostalgia in the 21st Century Film Musical," in this installment of the THEME Lecture series.
Abstract
Nostalgia has been a feature of Hollywood musicals since the genre’s beginning. Since the dawn of synchronized sound in the late 1920s, film musicals have dialogued with their own stage and screen pasts, combining familiarity and novelty to entertain audiences and reinforce certain cultural values. Classic Hollywood musicals–such as Singin’ in the Rain, White Christmas, and Meet Me in St. Louis–have become staples of American culture, kept alive by strong feelings of nostalgia. More recently, in the spate of new Hollywood musicals released in the 21st century, both original film musicals and Hollywood adaptations have contended in different ways with nostalgia, referencing older films and styles while also relying on new technology, cinematic techniques, and narrative approaches to update the genre and make it feel newly relevant and resonant. This presentation considers the manifestations of nostalgia in several contemporary film musicals (including La La Land, In the Heights, and West Side Story) in their audiovisual styles, narratives, and reception, to consider what the Hollywood musical genre, and its inherent nostalgic impulses, means for contemporary audiences.
Biography
Hannah Lewis serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas, Austin.
Dr. Lewis is a musicologist who specializes in music for film and visual media, American popular music traditions, musical theater, early twentieth-century French music, and American avant-garde and experimental music. She is the author of French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2019), La La Land (Oxford University Press, 2024), and co-editor (with Jim Buhler) of Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Her work has also appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Musical Quarterly, American Music, French Screen Studies, and The Soundtrack, as well as several edited volumes, and she presents regularly at national and international conferences, including the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, and Music and the Moving Image.
Her current research explores cultural and aesthetic aspects of the contemporary film musical, as well as musical theater and contemporary politics. In 2019, she received a collaborative research grant (with Media Studies professor Suzanne Scott) through UT’s Office of the Vice President of Research titled “The Cultural Impact of ‘The Eyes of Texas’: Antiracist Activism, Participatory Singing, and Fan Identity,” which explores the affective attachment different stakeholders have to the song, and how stakeholders navigate their relationship with the song with their lived identities (race, class, etc.). She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014 and has been teaching at the Butler School since then.
Series Background
THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education held on select Friday afternoons during the academic year.