Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:37am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Childhood in the 20th Century Session Chair: James Leve | |
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The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T: Propaganda Meets Pedagogy in the Original “Seuss-ical” Salve Regina University The 1953 children’s musical film The 5,000 Finger of Dr. T, with story, lyrics, and concept by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel, his only live-action film), is a complex nexus of art, politics, and cultural commentary, as well as a largely forgotten full-fledged Golden Age integrated musical. The score is by German composer Friedrich Hollaender, who fled to the USA in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and who is today best remembered for his work with Marlene Dietrich. In addition to ballets and incidental music, the original work contained fifteen original songs—including two solfege songs predating The Sound of Music’s famous “Do-Re-Mi”—that explore such topics as capitalism, noninterventionism/protectionism, drag(!), childhood, and the work’s own metatheatrical dream device (à la The Wizard of Oz). Eugene Loring (Billy the Kid) choreographed the central ballet sequence, and Hollaender received an Oscar nomination for his music. This study seeks to revive and re-examine the film as a work of political propaganda and cultural commentary in the guise of a forgotten Golden Age musical with a Seussian twist. Music itself, and music pedagogy, are both implicated in an overarching 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. Unlike other Cold-war-era musicals in which music serves in resisting fascism (Sound of Music, Cabaret), Dr. T uses music and music pedagogy as vehicles of a zany boarding-school authoritarianism ultimately defeated by sonic chaos and the “atomic” annihilation of sound itself. An outlandish 5,000-finger keyboard serves as the site of many of the “cross-cutting ambivalences and tensions” Gary C. Thomas associates with the post-war piano on film: fascism vs. freedom, masculine vs. feminine, control vs. chaos—to which is added the especially Seussian tensions between children and adults, and between bullies and the bullied. | |