Join us on Thursday, January 22nd at 4pm in the library atrium for our first faculty lecture of the spring 2026 semester!

Gabe Alfieri, PhD, holds advanced music degrees from Boston University and the New England Conservatory. As a musicologist, his current research interest include American theater & film music, and what he describes as "vocal polystylism." His work has been published in peer reviewed journals such as American Music, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and the Journal of Singing; and he has presented his research at several national conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Renaissance Society of America, and more. Gabe is also an active performing musician.

He wrote about this lecture: The 1953 children’s musical film The 5000 Finger of Dr. T (story, lyrics, and design by Dr. Seuss) is a complex nexus of art, politics, and cultural commentary. With music by German-Jewish émigré Friedrich Hollaender, who fled to the USA to escape the Nazis, it contains fifteen original songs that explore such topics as capitalism, noninterventionism/protectionism, drag, childhood, and the work’s own metatheatrical dream device. Unlike other Cold-war-era musicals in which music serves to resist fascism, Dr. T uses music as the vehicle of a zany authoritarianism ultimately defeated by sonic chaos and “atomic” annihilation of sound. An outlandish 5,000-finger keyboard serves as the site of “cross-cutting ambivalences and tensions” (Gary C. Thomas) associated with the post-war piano: fascism vs. freedom, masculine vs. feminine, control vs. chaos—and the particularly Seussian tension between children and adults. Further, this study examines the ideological conflict between the very order of society, exemplified by the mid-century American heteronormative nuclear family, and the dangers—social, political, and musical—of the absent father.