AED Research Seminar Series #1

Faculty of Arts and Education

Mickey’s Magical Musicals: The Disney Parks as Glocalised Soundscapes

201-440 (Building 201, Room 440)

The Walt Disney Company has an especially fraught relationship with their staging of the balance between the global and the local. Increasingly in their films, television shows, and theme parks, Disney is turning away from seeing non continental American locales as merely ‘exotic’ and trying instead to approach other cultures in an informed, sensitive way. Most of these attempts have involved music. Disney songs have increasingly become part of an established international canon, as audiences around the world share knowledge of a wide variety of songs from throughout the company’s history. While their success with balancing global and local concerns has been decidedly mixed, Disney’s attempts have been especially extensive in their twelve international theme parks. Disney revises, updates, and re-creates their canon of songs and characters in the parks to reflect the company’s current thinking around the place of American culture on the global stage, and they use the sound of English and other languages to convey Americanness or a lack thereof. In this talk, I will first discuss the varied uses of the Disney song canon in the series of anthology musicals that Disney presents in the theme parks around the world, then I will explore the sonic features of the languages that we hear from characters, employees (‘cast members’), and acousmatic announcements. Disney uses the sounds of music and language to carefully tread the line between the global and the local in these three-dimensional, experiential texts. About the Speaker: Dr Gregory Camp is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Associate Head Teaching and Learning in the University of Auckland School of Creative Arts, where he teaches a wide variety of topics in musicology and music theory. He is also the artistic director of the University of Auckland Opera Workshop, for which he directs a production each year. His doctoral research, undertaken at the Queen’s College, Oxford, was on the modern performance history of the operas of Claudio Monteverdi. He has published two monographs with Routledge on mid-twentieth century film music: Howard Hawks: Sonic Style in Film (2020) and Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s (2021), and chapters on Disney choral arrangements, community singing in Disney texts, and the aesthetics of the Disney Channel Original Musical corpus. His most recent books are Linguistics for Singers (Routledge, 2023), a manual that guides musicians through the poetic texts they work with via a holistic and comparative approach, and Music in the Disney Parks (Routledge, 2026), the first monograph on theme park music. Current work includes an anthology of opera libretto translations under contract with Oxford University Press and further work on Disney music. A long-time choral singer, he sings regularly with the Auckland Chamber Choir and Voices New Zealand.

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AED Research Seminar Series #1

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AED Research Seminar Series #1

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