One of America’s great composers of popular song, Jerome Kern, will be the focus of a free public lecture with musical accompaniment at Bristol University next Tuesday, October 21.   Called Scholarship and the musical: reclaiming Jerome Kern, the lecture will be given by the University’s newly appointed Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music, Stephen Banfield.

Kern wrote some of the world’s best-known and most enduring popular songs, including Smoke gets in your eyes and Ol’ man river, yet only one of his 40 stage musicals, Show Boat, is known today. 

All but a handful of his thousand published songs are out of print.   Hundreds more, and most of the libretti, were never published.  None of the major books on him contains a bibliography, and the great changes in performance practice during his lifetime have scarcely been considered. 

The lecture will be held in the Victoria Rooms, Queen’s Road, Bristol, from 5.15 pm and will be illustrated with live examples sung by students of the Music Department.

No pre-booking is necessary and the lecture is open to everyone.