Guest Scholar to Give Musicology Lecture

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Brian Locke

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Brian Locke, associate professor of music history at Western Illinois University, will give a lecture titled “'Golem' at the Liberated Theater – Czechs, Jews and Jazz in 1930s Prague” at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 14, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main as part of the Beyond the Holocaust series.

Locke’s research interests cover a wide range of topics in the Romantic and Early Modernist eras. His scholarship has maintained a significant focus on the musical community of Prague and its resonation in the political and social spectra of the Czech Republic. He has traveled to the nation multiple times to study the correlation between Czech folklore and a variety of contemporary styles that are popular in the Czech Republic today.

His lecture will focus on the Liberated Theater, an avant-garde theater scene in Prague that operated from 1926 until 1938, when Nazi forces prohibited its increasingly political and anti-fascist productions and its main players were forced to emigrate to the United States.

Locke has authored many independent articles for multiple publications, including The Journal of Musicological Research and American Music Research Center Journal and has presented his work at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music and others, including conferences in the Czech Republic.

His dissertation at the State University of New York, Stony Brook was published as a book entitled Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900-1938 (University of Rochester Press, 2006).

Locke has been a faculty member at Western Illinois University since 2006. Prior to his appointment at Western Illinois, he was on the faculty of Wilfred Laurier University, the University of Western Ontario and Dalhousie University. He currently serves as president of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and is working on a series of translations of source documents from Czech music history and an edition of Otakar Zich’s 1923 opera, Vina.

The Beyond the Holocaust series was made possible by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies. Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.