Pompeii & Herculaneum: Rediscovering Roman Art & Culture

April 27–28, 2012

At the height of the Roman Empire in 79AD, a massive volcanic eruption from long-silent Mount Vesuvius tragically destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, creating an archaeological snapshot of everyday life in two very different towns. Buried, lost, and forgotten for centuries, the ruins of the bustling city of Pompeii and the nearby seaside resort of Herculaneum were accidentally rediscovered in the eighteenth century, triggering a wave of popular excitement about Roman art and culture and providing an inexhaustible resource for archaeological research. Ongoing scientific excavations and art historical investigations continue to offer fresh insights into ancient daily life and culture, the nature of Roman urbanism, how we understand the distant past, and how that past influences the modern world.

Presented in collaboration with Consul General of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Center for Modern Greek Studies and the Classics Department, San Francisco State University.

Friday, April 27, 2012, 7:30 to 10:00 pm

Introductory Remarks. Patricia Lundberg and Michael Anderson

The Re-Discovery and Excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Gary Devore (Classics, Stanford University). The history of excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum is the history of the Italian nation, and also of the discipline of archaeology. The ruins of the cities destroyed in 79 CE by Mount Vesuvius were discovered and explored by antiquarians whose groundbreaking work contributed to the development of modern scientific excavation techniques. As evocative examples of daily life in the Roman Empire, Pompeii and Herculaneum also became important symbols for the recently unified Italian nation in the 19th century. Dr Devore will give a short account of the destruction and rediscovery of both ruined cities, and show how developments in archaeological methodology and nationalistic goals united to elucidate this unique insight into the ancient Roman world.

Double Performance.

The Scarlattis.
Anne-Kathryn Olsen (Soprano), Danielle Reutter-Harrah (Mezzo-Soprano), Susie FongHarpsichord), Hallie Pridham (Violoncello).

Cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti, Founder of Neapolitan School of Opera
(Naples, 1660-1725). Introduced by Kip Cranna.
Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti) (Naples, 1685 – Madrid,1757). Arranged by the Italian Cultural Institute and introduced by Luciano Chessa.

Saturday, April 28, 2012, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm

The Economic Life of Pompeii.
Theodore (Ted) Peña (Classics, UC Berkeley). Pompeii provides far and away the richest body of evidence regarding the complex set of structures that characterized economic life in the Roman world. After providing an introductory overview of what we know about the economy of Pompeii, Professor Peña focuses on three topics chosen to illustrate some of the more important aspects of economic activity in the town and its surrounding territory. These include the large-scale production of wine for the export market, as evidenced by the Villa Regina and Villa B at Oplontis, the production of craft goods for local consumption, as evidenced by the Porta di Nocera pottery workshop, and finance, as evidenced by the archive of business records detailing the activities of the banker Caecilius Iucundus.

Ongoing Archaeological Research in Pompeii and Herculaneum: Perspectives from the Via Consolare Project.
Michael Anderson (Classics, SFSU). Such is the wealth of information at Pompeii and Herculaneum that significant questions yet remain to be answered, and the sites continue to be the focus of numerous international projects of archaeological research. Interest has recently centered on sub-surface excavation undertaken to explain how these sites developed and changed throughout their histories. Professor Anderson presents an overview of current archaeological research at Pompeii and Herculaneum, especially from the perspective of recent results of the Via Consolare Project in Pompeii, a project run from San Francisco State University, designed to augment and interconnect ongoing research by means of targeted excavation and architectural analysis at either end of one of the most important Pompeian thoroughfares.

Lunch Break 12-1:30

Stephanie Pearson (UC Berkeley) introduces us to The House of Julius Polybius in Pompeii: the Altair4 Reconstruction. The House of Julius Polybius comes to life again thanks to an elaborate process of visual restoration achieved by Alessandro Furlan and his team at Altair 4 Multimedia of Rome for Professor Masanori Aoyagi of the University of Tokyo. Tens of alfrescos were digitally restored and the house reconstructed virtually, with the dynamics of the Vesuvius eruption and its impact on the house enhanced. A tridimensional technique leads the spectator to discover the rooms of the house, in all their details, including the exact position of everyday objects, precisely as they were found. The visitor experiences a house that is still “alive”, just a minute before the catastrophe. Some rare historical pictures showing the house at the moment of its rediscovery have been superimposed and then taken away from the corresponding virtual images: this leap in time allows for the understanding and confronting of what has really remained of the house and what has been virtually reconstructed.

If These Walls Could Speak: The Paintings of Pompeii. Lisa Pieraccini (Art History, UC Berkeley). From the Villa of the Mysteries to the House of the Vetti, Pompeian painting reveals a rich world of interior décor that speaks to us not only of fashionable painting styles and popular myths, but of the very owners who commissioned the paintings. Close examination of the interior decoration of Pompeian homes and villas shows how home owners expressed their personal beliefs and social aspirations through the subject matter chosen to decorate their walls. Likewise, public buildings and tombs provide examples of paintings used to advertise not only one’s business, but ultimately, one’s social status and social aspirations. Professor Pieraccini provides an analysis of a select group of both private and public paintings that reveal the competitive and intricate world of”display” in Pompeii.

Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.

Presenters

Michael A. Anderson (PhD, Cambridge) is Assistant Professor of Archeology in the Classics Department at SF State University and Director, Via Consolare Project, Pompeii. He has more than 15 years of experience in archaeological research, having worked as Field Director of the University of Bradford’s excavations (2002-2006), and has also worked on Pre-historic Malta and Iron-Age Scotland with the University of Cambridge (2004-6), and in Egypt with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (1998). His research interests include urban life of early Roman Empire; ancient domestic space, Roman material culture, architecture and art, excavation methodology and practice, geographical information systems (GIS), archaeological survey and the application of digital and computing technologies to archaeological research. His publications include The Casa del Chirurgo (VI i, 9-10.23). AAPP Final Reports Volume 1 (with D. Robinson) (In Preparation); “Disruption or Continuity? The Spatio-Visual Evidence of Post Earthquake Pompeii” in Pompeii: Cultural Standards, Practical Needs (In Press); “Putting the Reality in Virtual Reality: New Advances through Game Engine Technology’ in Layers of Perception (2008), and “Houses, GIS and the Micro-Topology of Pompeian Domestic Space” in Proceedings of the 14th Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (2005).

Luciano Chessa (SF Conservatory, PhD musicology, UC Davis; DMA piano and MA composition, Conservatory of Bologna). As a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloists, Luciano Chessa has been active in Europe, the US, and Australia. Recent compositions include A Heavenly Act, an opera with video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by the SFMOMA and premiered by the Ensemble Paralléle. As a music historian Chessa completed Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, the first monograph on the Futurist Russolo’s Art of Noise, out on UC Press in March 2012. Chessa’s Futurist expertise resulted in an invitation from New York’s PERFORMA to direct/conduct the first reconstruction of Russolo’s earliest intonarumori orchestra. The production was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best events in the arts of 2009; in March 2011 Chessa presented it in a sold out concert for Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival; in December 2011 Chessa conducted it with the New World Symphony as part of Art Basel | Miami Beach.

Gary Devore (PhD, University of Bradford, UK) is a Fellow in the Humanities and teaches at Stanford University. He spent over fifteen years excavating in Pompeii. From 2005-2009 he was a co-founder and co-director of the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project Porta Stabia, a project revealing the dynamic structural and social history of an entire working-class city block of Pompeii. He is now a co-director and principal investigator of new excavations starting in the UK at the Roman fort and town of Binchester (County Durham). His research interests include Greek and Roman archeology, history, and cultural studies, particularly of the subaltern. His latest publication is “The Fifth Season of Excavations at VIII.7.1-15 and the Porta Stabia at Pompeii: Preliminary report” (2010).

Susie Fong (Harpsichord) is active as a harpsichord soloist and continuo player and has participated in such festivals and workshops as the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute, American Bach Soloists Summer Academy, Vancouver Early Music Festival, and SFEMS. She has performed regularly as part of the SFCM Baroque Ensemble, including its concert version of Handel’s Alcina in 2011. Susie has an MM in Harpsichord Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Corey Jamason, and received her BA in Music at UC Berkeley, where she studied harpsichord with Laurette Goldberg and played in the Collegium Musicum. Susie is also an accomplished solo and chamber pianist, having studied with Audrey Grigsby and Robert Rios in Southern California. She currently performs in the Bay Area as part of Liaison as well as The Vinacessi Ensemble, and teaches harpsichord both privately and in the SFCM Preparatory and Adult Extension Division.

ALTAIR4 MULTIMEDIA was organized in 1986 by Alessandro Furlan, Pietro Galifi, and Stefano Moretti, who conceived the studio as an actual workshop where various technological and artistic disciplines would interact in a coordinated and rewarding dialogue. In multimedia technology, Altair4 found a new and more organic means of communication, where the fusion of different methodologies and disciplines such as art, architecture and archaeology lead to the formulation of new “synthesis” languages and a new understanding of the work in which we live. Altair4 has produced a wide range of 3D archaeological reconstructions, from Ancient Egypt and Greece and Pompeii to the Renaissance era, for use in Museums, Television Production, Internet, Interactive DVD-VIDEO/ROMs, Ipod and VideoMobile..WWW.ALTAIR4.COM

Anne-Kathryn Olsen (Soprano) has performed in Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, and in Hungary as a soloist with the Desert Spring Chorale, performing Mozart’s Credo Mass. She performed as a soloist at the 2011 Toronto Summer Baroque Institute in Charpentier’s Messe des Morts and also at Phoenix Symphony, Arizona Ballet, American Bach Phoenix, Phoenix Early Music Society, Arizona State Baroque Ensemble, and Academy of Baroque Opera in Seattle. Locally she has appeared with Voices of Music (as a winner of the Young Artist Competition,) San Francisco Choral Artists, Oakland Civic Orchestra, Opera San Jose, and Starlite Vineyard Chamber Music Series. Her operatic credits include Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare and Oberto in Alcina with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Baroque Ensemble, as well as Lucy in Telephone and The Dew Fairy in Hansel and Gretel. She is a member of Liaison, a chamber group specializing in French baroque repertoire. Her Bachelor’s is from the Herberger School of Fine Arts at Arizona State University and Master’s from San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Stephanie Pearson (History of Art, UC Berkeley) completed her M.A. on the sculptural technique of ancient Gandhara (modern-day Pakistan) and is currently writing her dissertation on Roman wall painting and its artistic borrowings from Hellenistic Greece and Egypt. Questions of cross-cultural interaction and artistic technique and process count among her main research interests. Alongside her own studies, Stephanie has enjoyed the opportunity to assistant-teach courses on various topics (including Roman painting and Etruscan art and archaeology) and to conduct field work around the Mediterranean — most importantly at Pompeii, where she has worked with the Via Consolare Project for four years. She is very active in the Archaeological Institute of America, having chaired sessions and presented papers in a number of the annual conferences and now in professional service at the national level as well as in the San Francisco Chapter.

J. Theodore Peña (PhD, University of Michigan) is Professor of Classics at UC Berkeley. His research interests include Roman archaeology, the ancient economy, material culture studies, and pottery analysis. He has participated in the direction of archaeological excavations at Statonia, a small Etrusco-Roman town in the Tiber Valley, and on the Palatine Hill, in downtown Rome. He is currently in the initial stages of a long-term research project that will investigate aspects of the life history of artifacts at Pompeii. He is perhaps best known as the author of Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record(2007), a book-length essay that reconstructs the life cycle of pottery in the Roman world with a view to helping archaeologists better understand how Roman pottery came to be incorporated in archaeological deposits. Some of his recent publications on Pompeii include “The production and distribution of pottery at Pompeii: a review of the evidence. American Journal of Archaeology 113.1:57-59, 113.2:165-201 (with M. McCallum, 2009), and “A reinterpretation of two groups of tituli picti from Pompeii and environs: Sicilian wine, not flour and hand-picked olives.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 20:233-254 (2007).

Lisa C. Pieraccini (PhD, UC Santa Barbara) (History of Art, UC Berkeley) has taught at Stanford and now teaches at UC Berkeley. She is a classical archaeologist who has spent many years teaching and conducting research in Italy. Her research interests include Etruscan and Roman material culture; Pompeii’s early development and cultural relations with neighboring peoples; the rediscovery of Pompeii in the 18th century, as well as Etruscan and Roman wall painting. Active at the Etruscan site of Cerveteri north of Rome, her publications include Etruscan burial customs, ceramic workshops and international trade. Her book, Around the Hearth: Caeretan Cylinder-Stamped Braziers (2003) is the first comprehensive study of a unique class of over three hundred and fifty Etruscan braziers. Her analysis examines different aspects of origin, production, iconography, style, chronology and distribution.

Hallie Pridham (Violoncello) graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy in 2005 where she was principle cellist and won their 2005 concerto competition. At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music she studied modern cello with Jean-Michel Fonteaneau and baroque cello and viola da gamba with Elisabeth Reed. In 2007, Hallie performed with other members of the SFCM Baroque Ensemble at Kennedy Center in Washington DC for a broadcasted concert. In 2010, she won the SFCM Baroque Ensemble Concerto Competition and received the outstanding achievement award. Hallie received a scholarship to attend the American Bach Soloists Academy for the second year in summer 2011 and performed at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2011 with Early Music America’s Young Performers Ensemble. Hallie performs with Liaison and The Vinacessi Ensemble, the San Francisco Bach Choir and is house concert manager for San Francisco Early Music Society.

Danielle Reutter-Harrah (Mezzo-Soprano) hails from Portland, Oregon, and is an avid performer of baroque and early music. Recent performances include Lotti’s Mass for Three Choirs and Bach’s Magnificat for American Bach Soloists and Bach’s Mass in B Minor with San Francisco Bach Choir. Danielle has been featured in Handel’s Messiah, Duruflé’s Requiem, Fux’ Requiem, Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio, Bruckner’s Requiem and other works. Recently she performed the role of Ruggiero in Handel’s Alcina at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and she performed the lead role in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado. She has sung with Musica Sacra, St. Martin’s Chamber Choir, and Opera San Jose and is currently a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver and a master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The Power and Glory of China’s Ming Dynasty

February 10–11, 2012

Herbst Theatre, San Francisco

In 1368, a military genius born a peasant reunited China and drove the once-invincible Mongol cavalry back to the homeland of Genghis Khan. The Hongwu emperor revitalized the world’s largest economy yet eschewed both military and commercial adventurism. But his half-Mongol son, the Yongle emperor, rebuilt the Mongol capital at Beijing and lavished resources on vast fleets led by the Muslim eunuch Zheng He. Decades before Columbus sailed, maritime power extended Ming military and diplomatic influence to Southeast Asia, India and East Africa. Trade flourished, spurred by Ming productivity, the unquenchable European thirst for porcelain, and the vast silver reserves of Mexico and Peru. Ming urban culture transmuted that silver into a blossoming of arts, crafts, literature, and drama that rivaled the cultural riches of the Renaissance. By 1644, desperation among the rural poor, declining fiscal control, and a renewed challenge from the north brought down the Ming dynasty, leaving the less exuberant Qing regime to warily fend off ever-increasing European maritime power and arrogance.

In collaboration with the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.

Friday, February 10, 2012, 7:30 to 10:00 pm

Welcome and Overview of Program. Moderator, Wen-hsin Yeh (Director, Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley)

Melody of Chinaperformers Yangqin Zhao and Gangqin Zhao of San Francisco perform on the Yangqin and Guzheng.

Ming China and the Larger World. Timothy Brook (Chinese History, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia). The Ming founder came to power by defeating the Mongol occupation and declaring that he would restore China to its original character as a village society. That he failed was not for want of trying. But the world had changed since the Song dynasty, and the Ming had to change with it. There would be no return to arcadia when goods could be traded, trade routes followed, and money made. His son Yongle would be more aggressive in casting the Ming as a maritime power, famously sending his Muslim eunuch Zheng He on diplomatic excursions into the Indian Ocean. But the bigger story is that Chinese, slowly but surely, were discovering profitable links with economies elsewhere. The flood of trade was unstoppable, fueling a prosperity that Chinese had not known for centuries and drawing Europeans around the world in unprecedented numbers. A global economy was on the horizon.

Art and Visual Culture at the Ming Court. Michael Knight (Chinese Art, Asian Art Museum, SF). Great changes occurred in court arts during the 276 years of the Ming dynasty. In the early decades of the dynasty, the main concerns were building an appropriate imperial capital and demonstrating the legitimacy of the emperor. By the end of the dynasty some estimates place the number of members of the imperial family as high as 60,000; each member both a drain on state resources and a potential consumer of art. Throughout the dynasty, a vast array of objects was required to serve the needs of the court; these ranged from the simplest bowl for serving rice to items used in the most elaborate court rituals. This lecture provides an overview of the function of art at the Ming court in four sections: the court environment at the primary capital of Beijing and the secondary capital at Nanjing; daily life and entertainment at court; visual symbols of hierarchy and rank; and court religion.

Saturday, February 11, 2012, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm

Welcome. Wen-hsin Yeh, Moderator

Manifesting Heaven’s Mandate: the Yongle Emperor’s Fight for Legitimacy. Sarah Schneewind (History, UC San Diego). The Ming founder passed over his fourth son, Zhu Di, for the succession, choosing instead a peaceable grandson likely to change the violent tenor of his own reign. But Zhu Di usurped his nephew’s throne in a bloody civil war and alienated the allegiance of the most respected literati men. His power, as the Yongle emperor, was not in question, but throughout his reign, he strove in numerous and dramatic ways to assert his legitimacy to the broad public, within the framework of the venerable Mandate of Heaven ideology. The dramatic pre-Columbian sea voyages led by the Muslim eunuch Zheng He were part of that effort. While his successors ended the voyages, Yongle’s legitimation strategies affected the Ming path forward, and the way historians have understood the Ming period.

Late Ming Drama. Sophie Volpp. The late Ming (roughly 1570-1644) ushered in the golden age of the Chinese literary drama, when a gentleman might be expected to have some skill as a playwright. Literati composed plays in unprecedented numbers and owned private acting troupes, often coaching the actors themselves. The stage so dominated the cultural sensibility of the period that theatricality came to occupy an important ideological niche in diverse genres of cultural production. This lecture focuses on the particular quality of relations among literati and actors in the privileged and precarious world of the late Ming. The Peach Blossom Fan (1698) is not a late-Ming play, but we include it here not only because it dramatizes the fall of the Ming but because it provides a fully-realized incarnation of the concerns regarding theatricality that are so dominant in late-Ming drama.

Lunch. Theatre closes from noon to 1 pm. Program resumes at 1:30 pm

Late Ming Drama: The Peony Pavilion in Performance. Sheila Melvin. Late Ming drama has had a renaissance in China and Taiwan after the revival in 2004-05 of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion(Mudan ting) in a “Youth edition” by producer Pai Hsien-yung performed at China’s top universities (and UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall). Kunqu –the style of opera–had been a dying art with an aging audience of cognoscenti. Pai Hsien-yung’s production revived it with a production that featured vivid staging on lavish sets and starred young actors with rigorous training. Kunqu became popular among younger audiences, and a host of Ming plays were revived. Most recently, small-scale chamber opera has become fashionable, in response to the block-buster productions of the kunqurevival. This presentation considers Pai Hsien-yung’s production of Peony Pavilion against the backdrop of two East-West collaborations: Chen Shizheng’s 1999 Lincoln Center production, which showcased traditional Chinese popular arts, and Peter Sellars’s 1998 experimental version, which featured music by experimental composer Tan Dun, best known for his score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Ming in Retrospect. Lynn Struve (History, Indiana University). Members of the educated social stratum who faced the collapse of the “Great Ming” were filled with conflicted feelings about the impending demise. On one hand, they were acutely aware of the dynasty’s numerous present problems, which typically signaled the end of Heaven’s patience with any Chinese ruling order. On the other, the two fatal challenges to the dynasty’s existence—insurrections of commoners and invasions by “barbarians”—brought directly to mind the principal reasons why the Ming founder, Taizu, had never ceased to be revered as a great dynastic progenitor. Ironically, many placed blame for the dynasty’s difficulties on the emperor who actually had brought the Ming to the pinnacle of its geopolitical greatness, the third emperor Chengzu. He increasingly was seen to have marred the dynasty’s cosmic moral legitimacy in his fratricidal usurpation of the throne—a violation that was being finally paid for in the seventeenth century.

Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.

A native of Toronto, Timothy Brook earned degrees from University of Toronto and Harvard and taught at both. He has held appointments at University of Alberta, Stanford, University of British Columbia, and Oxford University. At UBC he also holds the Republic of China Chair in UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He is an honorary professor of East China Normal University, Shanghai, and holds an honorary doctorate from University of Warwick. He has published five books on the Ming dynasty, two on China in the 20th century, and one on global history. He has also edited nine volumes. For The Confusions of Pleasure (1998), he received the Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies and the Garneau Medal from the Canadian Historical Association. Vermeer’s Hat (2008) was awarded the Lynton Prize in History by Columbia School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation of Harvard. Death by a Thousand Cuts (2008) was given the Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical Association. Brook edits the six-volume History of Imperial China (Harvard); his volume is The Troubled Empire (2010). Translations of his books have appeared in a dozen languages.

Michael Knight serves as the Senior Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of SF. Prior to coming to the Asian Art Museum in 1996, Dr. Knight spent 15 years at the Seattle Art Museum with his final posting as the Foster Foundation Associate Curator of Asian Art. He also taught for four years at the University of Washington where he was Affiliate Assistant Professor of Chinese Art. Michael received his PhD in Chinese Art History, Master of Philosophy and Master of Arts from Columbia University and his Bachelor of Arts from Willamette University. He is curator or co-curator of many exhibitions, including Shanghai: Art of the City (2010), Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty (2008), Later Chinese Jades: Ming Dynasty to Early Twentieth Century (2008), The Elegant Gathering: the Yeh Family Collection (2006), and The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi (2004).

Sheila Melvin is a writer and consultant who specializes in China. A regular contributor to the International Herald Tribune, primarily on the arts in China, she has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Wilson Quarterly, and other publications. She is co-author, with her husband Jindong Cai, ofRhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, which was short-listed for the Saroyan Prize in 2005, and the author of The Little Red Book of China Business. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she taught English in Taipei while studying Chinese and was a student at Shanghai’s Fudan University in the tumultuous spring of 1989. She has an honors MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and received the school’s A. Doak Barnett Award for Excellence in China Studies.

Sarah Schneewind (Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego) specializes in the Ming era (1368-1644), which juxtaposed autocracy to commercial prosperity and cultural creativity. She is also interested in Chinese-European intellectual, cultural, and technological exchange from Ming times through the nineteenth century. Her scholarly work explores how people dealt with imperial power, how state power negotiated with society, and how historical texts were constructed and read in political context. She is writing a study of the biographies of an early Ming scholar-official executed for corruption and honored as an incorrupt official, Fang Keqin; and is researching the institution of shrines to living men. Her degrees are from Cornell (BA), Yale (MA), and Columbia University (PhD), and she is Past-President of the Society for Ming Studies. Major publications include A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China (2006); Long Live the Emperor! The Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History (2008); and Community Schools and the State in Ming China (2006).

Lynn Struve is Professor Emerita of History, Indiana University (PhD, University of Michigan). Her interests are the political, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth century China, and in comparing Chinese phenomena of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with contemporaneous phenomena elsewhere. Research has focused on the fall of the Ming dynasty and the early rule of China by the Manchu-Qing dynasty, particularly on personal records left by people then, which vividly reveal the subjective consciousness of members of the literate social stratum as their world fell into turmoil. Other, related specializations are Ming and Qing historiography, late-imperial trends in Neo-Confucianism and classical scholarship, and psychological aspects of autobiographical expression in the Ming-Qing era. She has held grants from American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright Foundation, and the Committee for Scholarly Research in the PRC. Publications include The Southern Ming, 1644-1662 (1984); Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm: China in Tigers’ Jaws (1993); The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619-1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (1998); (ed.) The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (2004); (ed.) Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing (2005).

Sophie Volpp is Associate Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultures (Chinese), UC Berkeley, in the Chinese Program and Comparative Literature (Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard, 1995). She specializes in Chinese literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Research interests include the history of performance, gender theory, the history of sexuality, and the representation of material culture. Her forthcoming book Worldly Stage (Harvard) concerns the ideological niche occupied by the theater in seventeenth-century China. Her current research examines the depiction of material objects in late-imperial literature, focusing on the relation between the representation of objects and the representation of the self.

Wen-Hsin Yeh is Walter and Elise Haas Chair Professor in Asian Studies and Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair in History, UC Berkeley. She is also an Honorary Professor of History at Peking University. As Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, Yeh fosters inter-disciplinary and cross-regional research situated in both historical and contemporary East Asia. A leading authority on twentieth-century Chinese history, Yeh is author or editor of eleven books and numerous articles examining aspects of Republican history, Chinese modernity, the origins of communism and related subjects. Her most recent publication, Shanghai Splendor (2007) is an urban history of Shanghai that considers the nature of Chinese capitalism and middle-class society in a century of contestation between colonial power and nationalistic mobilization.

Gangqin Zhao, a member of Chinese Musicians’ Association, finished her study in the Music Department of Nanjing Normal University in 1987. She was named one of 10 Best Musicians by the university in 1990. She was an instructor of guzheng in the Nanjing Children Music and Dance School for years before she immigrated to the US in the late 1990s. She has performed internationally and is the director of Chinese Arts & Music Center in San Francisco. Her students competed in the 2010 International World Cup Chinese Instruments Competition where they won Gold Medals.

Yangqin Zhao is Artistic Director, Melody of China. A member of Chinese Musicians’ Association and the Chinese Nationalities Orchestra Society, Zhao graduated with Honors in Music at Nanjing Normal University and headed the faculty of Instrumental Music there. She won the highest award by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in 1982 and first prize at the Jiangsu Provincial Arts Festival in 1987 and 1991. She appeared in Who’s Who in Young Chinese and The Chinese Musicians Yearbook in 1990. She has performed in Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Germany. In 1996, she was invited as one of seven greatest musicians on the yangqin for the Tanz & Folk Fest Rudolstadt in Germany. Zhao represented China and the US playing the Chinese hammered dulcimer at the International Santur Festival in Iran in 2003. She has performed with the Shanghai Chinese and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, The Woman Philharmonic, and the SF Symphony.

Presented with support from Grants for the Arts/SF Hotel Tax fund; George and Judy Marcus Family Foundation; Bank of the West; Stanford Humanities Center; UC Berkeley Institute for East Asian Studies, USF Center for the Pacific Rim; Marines Memorial Theatre; Asian Art Museum, and individual donors.

Notre Dame: The Soul of Medieval Paris

November 4–5, 2011

Built on the site of a Roman basilica and restored over a dozen centuries, Notre Dame long reigned in splendor as the cultural, intellectual, religious, and economic center of Paris, the most powerful city in northern Europe during the Middle Ages. The cathedral’s powerful towers, grand gargoyles, flying buttresses and soaring interior represent amazing achievements in medieval Gothic architecture. Its magnificent stained glass, sumptuous art, and glorious music have inspired awe and creative expression throughout the ages.

Friday, November 4, 2011, 7:30 to 10:00 pm

Notre-Dame of Paris and Manifest Destiny.
Stephen Murray (Medieval Art, Columbia University).
The great cathedral dominates the urban skyline, overawing us with its boat-like silhouette, powerful towers, menacing gargoyles and velvety-dark interior spaces pierced by shafts of brilliantly colored light from high windows. For us, Notre-Dame of Paris appears to represent the certainty of France becoming France, with Paris as its capital. However, when this great church was begun the Capetian kings of France were struggling for control over a city that was not yet capital of a France that was not yet France, while their rivals, the Plantagenets, controlled a mighty empire extending from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Can we return to the uncertainties of the mid-twelfth century and the start of work on a great church that was quite different from anything ever seen before and quite different from the Notre-Dame we know? Are there surprises to be found in this, the best-loved and most visited of all the great cathedrals? And how is it that Gothic, born in such precarious circumstances, can create such a powerful illusion of manifest destiny?

Performance
The Cathedral and the Lady.
Clerestory: Jesse Antin, Kevin Baum, John Bischoff, Dan Cromeenes, Chris Fritzsche, Tom Hart, David Kurtenbach, Clifton Massey, Jim Monios, and Justin Montigne. Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna (Director of Music Administration, SF Opera).

Beata Viscera	Pérotin (fl. c. 1200)
Agnus Dei from Messe de Nostre Dame	Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 – 1377)
Ave Regina Coelorum	Guillaume Dufay (1397 – 1474)
Riches d’Amour	Guillaume de Machaut
D’un Autre Amer	Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410 – 1497)
Virgo Rosa	Gilles Binchois (c. 1400 – 1460)
Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure	Guillaume de Machaut
Viderunt Omnes	Pérotin
Ave Maria, Virgo Serena	Jean Mouton (1459 – 1522)
Agnus Dei from Missa de Beata Virgine	Josquin Des Prez (c. 1450 – 1521)
Salut, Dame Sainte from Quatre Petit Prières de Saint François d’Assise	Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963)
Tota Pulchra Es	Maurice Duruflé (1902 – 1986)
Hymne à la Vierge	Pierre Villette (1926 – 1998)

Saturday, November 5, 2011, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm

The Gothic Enterprise: Cathedral Building in Europe, 1137-1550.
Robert A. Scott (Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford).
Notre Dame de Paris is one of Europe’s greatest cathedrals, and we are awestruck and humbled by its magnificence. But it is equally astonishing to realize that hundreds of other cathedrals and great churches were being built during the same period all over Europe, together comprising one of the architectural and social achievements of Western culture. Gothic Cathedrals invite us to think about what inspired the audacity to build them. Why would a society that was so impoverished want to invest so much capital and effort in buildings that were physically stupendous, yet produced nothing tangible? What conception of the divine lay behind their creation? What were they for? And how did religious and secular leaders use cathedrals for their own social status and political advancement? In this lecture Scott explores the social, cultural, religious, ideological and political contexts in which Notre Dame and other cathedrals of Europe were conceived and built.

Notre Dame and the Emergence of the Medieval Retributive Cosmos.
Hester Gelber (Religious Studies, Stanford).
During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, just when the Bishops of Paris were planning and erecting the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the concept of retributive justice, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked, began to dominate the western European imagination. Christ and Mary as the dispensers of justice and mercy ruled over a spatialized terrain in which their mythologized interaction in the salvation and punishment of souls set the model for the mythologized interactions of kings and queens in the earthly retributive sphere. In this retributive cosmology, justice and mercy, mediated through obedience, were the dominant virtues, virtues prominently in evidence in Gothic cathedral façades. Both bishops and kings had a vested interest in the imagery of justice and mercy, and the sculpture of Notre Dame is a nearly perfect evocation of the emergent retributive system.

Lunch Break

Performance and Lecture.
Apocalypse and Debauchery: Anti-clericalism in Medieval French Music and Literature.Multi-instrumentalist and Singer Tim Rayborn (Berkeley) explores the rise of secular culture in mid-thirteenth-century Paris and the conflicts with religious organizations that followed from it. He focuses on the arguments between the secular masters and the mendicant orders at the University of Paris, and how this debate found its way into the secular music and poetry of the time. He will present examples of this poetry and music, performed with medieval instruments, and show how anti-clericalism became an important part of medieval French artistic culture, despite the inherent dangers of angering Church authorities.

Victor Hugo and Notre-Dame de Paris.
Suzanne Guerlac (French, UC Berkeley). In French the title of Hugo’s celebrated and very popular novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is simply Notre Dame de Paris, the name of the Cathedral that still sits in the heart of Paris. What happens in this act of translation? How is it that in passing from one language to another we seem to slide from the sublime, the sacred monument, to the grotesque character of Quasimodo, whose body is hideously deformed and whose spirit is quickly broken. Which one lies at the heart of the novel? In fact, they both do, one inside the other. What is the meaning of this identification between the two?

Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.

Presenters

Clerestory features Jesse Antin, Kevin Baum, John Bischoff, Dan Cromeenes, Chris Fritzsche, Tom Hart, Clifton Massey, Jim Monios,and Justin Montigne. Clerestory is the Bay Area’s acclaimed nine-man classical a cappella ensemble. Veterans of SF’s finest professional vocal groups, Clerestory’s singers, from countertenor to bass, remain members of the Bay Area choral community and pride themselves on providing unparalleled performances to local audiences. Clerestory is named for cathedral architecture whereby upper windows let in daylight. The ensemble tells the “clear story” of the music it performs through sophisticated performances grounded in decades of experience singing together. Clerestory has been described as “distinctive voices blending in a gorgeous sound” by San Francisco Classical Voice, and “a model of what a great choral concert should be” by BBC Magazine columnist Chloe Veltman. Clerestory’s website, www.clerestory.org, features free archived concert recordings and a private e-mail list sign-up. Clerestory is a tax-exempt non-profit that relies on the generosity of its community to sustain its progressive mission.

Clifford (Kip) Cranna (PhD, Musicology, Stanford) is Director of Musical Administration at SF Opera. He has served as vocal adjudicator for numerous groups including the Metropolitan Opera National Council. For many years he was Program Editor and Lecturer for the Carmel Bach Festival. He lectures and writes frequently on music and teaches at the SF Conservatory of Music. He hosts the Opera Guild’s “Insight” panels and intermission features for the SF Opera radio broadcasts, and has been a Music Study Leader for Smithsonian Tours. In 2008 he was awarded the SF Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor.

Hester G. Gelber, Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford (PhD, Wisconsin),specializes in late medieval religious thought. She teaches courses on philosophy of religion as well as medieval Christianity. She has written extensively on medieval Dominicans, including: Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God by Robert Holcot OP and most recently It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford 1300-1350. Her current book project is a study of the development of the medieval religious cosmos as a mythologized system of retributive justice.

Suzanne Guerlac received her BA in philosophy from Barnard College and her PhD in French from Johns Hopkins University. She is professor of modern French studies at UC Berkeley, having taught previously at Emory University, the University of Virginia, Yale and Johns Hopkins. She is the author of three books. The first, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and the Esthetics of the Sublime concerns the esthetics of French romanticism and modernism. The second, Literary Polemics, Bataille, Sartre, Valéry and Breton, concerns competing theories of literary art in the first half of the twentieth Century. Her third book, Thinking in Time, is an introduction to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Most recently she has co-edited a book of essays on the philosopher Jacques Derrida, Derrida and the Time of the Political. She has published a number of articles on Victor Hugo here and in France.

Stephen Murray is Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art at Columbia University. He was educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1986 and currently serves as Director of the Media Center for Art History, Archaeology & Historic Preservation. His publications include books on the cathedrals of Amiens, Beauvais and Troyes; his current work is on medieval sermons, story-telling in Gothic, and the Romanesque architecture of the Bourbonnais. His field of teaching includes Romanesque and Gothic art, particularly involving the integrated understanding of art and architecture within a broader framework of economic and cultural history. He is currently engaged in projecting his cathedral studies through the electronic media using a combination of three-dimensional simulation; digital imaging and video, through the Mapping Gothic France Project atwww.mappinggothicfrance.com.

Tim Rayborn, an acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, plays dozens of musical instruments from medieval Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans, including lutes, plucked strings, flutes, and percussion. He has recorded on more than 30 CDs for a number of labels, including Gaudeamus, Wild Boar, Harmonia Mundi, EMP, and Magnatune. Tim lived in the UK for seven years, taking his MA and PhD in medieval studies at the University of Leeds, and working as a musician. He has toured the US and Europe extensively from Ireland to Turkey, including concerts at the York and Beverley Early Music Festivals, Alden Biesen Castle in Belgium, Bunyloa in Majorca, and Spitalfields Festival in London. He has performed for BBC in the UK and Channel Islands, toured in Canada and Australia, and worked with folk musicians in Marrakech and Istanbul. He has taught at the SFEMS Medieval/Renaissance summer workshop and Pinewoods Early Music week in MA, and has appeared with many early music performers, including Ensemble Alcatraz, Anne Azema, Margriet Tindemans, Susan Rode Morris, Tom Zajac, and Sinfonye. In addition to solo work, he currently performs with Patrick Ball and collaborates regularly with Shira Kammen.www.timrayborn.com

Robert A. Scott is Associate Director Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is the coauthor of Why Sociology Does Not Apply (1979); author of Making of Blind Men (1969); editor of several collections of essays about stigma, deviancy, and social control; and author of numerous articles, book chapters, and essays on related topics. His most recent publications include Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and the Healing Powers of Belief (2010) and The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral (2003, 2006). He continues to do research and write books about medieval gothic cathedrals of Europe.