The Music Department’s Lecture Series presents a talk by Assistant Professor of Musicology Colin Roust (University of Kansas) on Tuesday, October 25 at 4:00 in 250 Baird Hall. Professor Roust’s paper is entitled “An Ultramodernist Goes Pop: Georges Auric and Pop Culture from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

An abstract of Professor Roust’s paper:

Although Georges Auric’s early notoriety rested on his reputation as a favorite composer of virtually every avant-garde group in 1920s Paris, he would later devote his career to finding the broadest audiences possible. While I have published on his aesthetic shift to populism in the 1930s, this talk focuses on Auric’s contributions to pop culture in the decades after World War II. His many film scores yielded a number of songs that became both jazz standards and popular hits—including Billboard’s “#1 Song of 1953,” which would later be covered by artists as diverse as the Chordettes, Andy Williams, Chet Atkins, Sam Cooke, and Willie Nelson. Other works to be discussed include a sound-and-light show for a Loire Valley castle and a rock musical composed with the jazz-funk pianist Gilbert Sigrist.