Michael Miller to Give Music Lecture Sept. 20

WOOSTER, Ohio – Michael Miller, chair of the Ohio Light Opera board of directors, will present “I’ve Heard That Before … Has the Composer?” on Friday, Sept. 20, at 11:30 a.m. in room 106 of Scheide Music Center (525 E. University St.) at The College of Wooster. Admission is free and open to the public.
Miller will discuss how the tunes of opera, operetta, and musical theatre are often borrowed with or without the consent of the composer. There have been numerous court cases involving some of the biggest names in the music world that have forced judges to decipher whether the use is coincidental, inadvertent, or intentional. He will play examples of tune pilfering for discussion.
Miller, a mathematician by trade who spent 25 years as a senior mathematician with the Rand Corporation and has taught mathematics at UCLA for the past 46 years, developed a love of opera during college and turned into an operetta aficionado. He and his wife Nan have accumulated quite the collection of operetta and music ephemera consisting of over 60,000 recordings, 25,000 pieces of sheet music, 11,000 books, 6,000 vocal scores, and numerous posters, postcards, radio broadcasts, and more. In addition to serving as chair of the OLO board of directors, he is president of the Operetta Foundation, a nonprofit research institution dedicated to preserving and promoting operetta.
Additional information is available by phone 330-263-2419.

Posted in Event on September 13, 2019.