More than two millennia after her death, Cleopatra VII remains an enigma and an object of fascination. The last Ptolemaic ruler of Hellenistic Egypt and the most influential woman of her times, Cleopatra amassed enormous wealth and power. She lived dangerously and died sensationally. Ever since, she has been an iconic figure, continually re-imagined through the cultural prisms of successive ages.
Presented with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute.
Friday, May 5, 7:30 – 9:30 pm
Cleopatra: The Last Pharaoh / Stacy Schiff. Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. She was married twice, each time to a brother: she waged a brutal civil war against the first and poisoned the second. She dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men—Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, with both of whom she had children. Famous long before she was notorious, she has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Even before the Roman intrigues she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their spectacular ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.
Performance: Cleopatra at the Opera: Excerpts from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. Of the numerous operas inspired by Cleopatra’s life and legends, the arguably most successful is George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt) of 1724. Its heroine Cleopatra proves herself to be a multifaceted and fascinating character who uses her beauty, wit and wiles to seduce Caesar in order to gain power, but then falls in love with him. Together they combat her brother, the would-be Pharaoh Ptolemy, and win for her the throne of Egypt. Live performances of excerpts from the opera will bring alive this fabled love affair as viewed with Eighteenth-Century eyes. Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna (SF Opera). Sara Duchovnay (soprano) and Mariya Kaganskaya (mezzo-soprano), accompanied by Steven Harmon (french horn) and Andrew Wang (piano).
Saturday, May 6, 10:00 am – noon and 1:30 – 4:00 pm
Cleopatra’s Alexandria / Grant Parker (Classics, Stanford). When she wasn’t being Caesar’s mistress or Antony’s wife, Cleopatra ruled Egypt for twenty-one years. She headed an enormous imperial bureaucracy that received and sent ambassadors from as far away as India, levied taxes, oversaw the harvest, sales, and distribution of cereal crops, built temples, and acted as high priestess in the sacred rituals of the Egyptians. Her capital city was Alexandria, the first city of the Mediterranean until the rise of Rome; the greatest center of learning (including mathematics and medicine) in the Western world; an entrepot for trade with India, Africa, the Levant and with Greece, Italy, Sicily and Spain. Ancient documents (one of which may even contain her signature) provide insights into how she negotiated the last years of her country’s independence.
Cleopatra’s Mark on Rome / Lisa Pieraccini (Classics, UC Berkeley). The name Cleopatra conjures up much in the popular imagination today–a powerful Egyptian queen who was the lover and wife of two of Rome’s most famous leading men. She is known as the ruler of the east who combined her personal and public affairs with the west. But what do we really know about her relationships with Caesar, Mark Antony and the city of Rome? What happened to her children by both Caesar and Mark Antony? What artistic mark did she leave in Rome – the city that celebrated both her visit during the time of Julius Caesar as well as her death after the battle of Actium?
Performance: Mark Antony and Cleopatra: A Chamber Cantata by Antonio Scarlatti. Among the countless composers who were attracted to the story of Cleopatra was the great master of the Italian Baroque Antonio Scarlatti (1660-1725). His brief chamber cantata Marc Antonio e Cleopatra gives us a glimpse of two famous rulers torn between their loving devotion and the call to battle to defeat their enemies. Tender sentiments mix with vocal acrobatics in this gem of a chamber duet inspired by history — and legend. Introduced by Kip Cranna. Two vocalists: Mariya Kaganskaya (mezzo-soprano), Sara Duchovnay (soprano), and Andrew Wang (piano).
Death Becomes Her: The Suicide of Cleopatra in Western Culture / Robert Gurval (Classics, UCLA) The suicide of Cleopatra has bequeathed to western culture one of the most famous and memorable death scenes in literature, drama and the visual arts of painting, sculpture and film. The traditional story derives chiefly from the rich narrative of Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony. Its action is driven by multiple themes of deception, deliberation, and death. The climactic moment, of course, is the bite of the asp. Surveying the literary and visual representations of Cleopatra’s dramatic death, from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women to the mini-series HBO Rome in the 21st century, this illustrated lecture will explore the potent symbolism of the suicide in classical antiquity and subsequent eras. It will try to answer the question whether her final act of dying by the serpent’s bite redeems Cleopatra and Death becomes Her.
From the sacking of Lindisfarne Abbey in 793 until the end of the 11th century, voyaging Scandinavian traders and warriors played a decisive role in the formation of European culture. Not merely fearsome sackers of coastal farming communities, these fearless travelers spread their cultural influence (and genes) from Newfoundland to Russia and from Portugal to Byzantium, Baghdad and Sicily. The Vikings excelled in the commerce of gold, silver and slaves. They advanced nautical knowledge and crafted elaborate decorative arts. Their legendary exploits are vividly reimagined in the remarkable Old Norse sagas.
They journeyed boldly; / Went far for gold, / Fed the eagle /Out in the east, /And died in the south / In Saracenland
–Gripshold Rune-Stone (c. 1050) reprinted in Smithsonian.com March 2014 p 46.
Friday, February 24, 2017, 7:30 to 9:35 pm
On seeing the Vikings through the lens of Mediterranean Studies / Moderator, Fred Astren (SFSU)
Viking Legacies / Patrick Hunt (CMEMS Associate, Stanford). Biased chronicles depicting the shock and awe of Vikings raids have long held sway in public opinion. Yet archeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s seminal mid-19th century work in Copenhagen not only pioneered more precise artifact studies of Scandinavian antiquities and Viking ethnography in particular but also highlighted the differences in distinct human material phases. The discovery and conservation of the buried well-built lapstrake Viking longships at Oseberg and Gokstad underscored the viability of long distance seafaring coupled with navigational skills and other finds that were obscure until recently. However maligned the “Norsemen” might have been in hyperbolic clerical accounts of “raiders” (or traders), the rich Viking contributions to European cultural life and language from runestones to Danelaw are only now becoming better understood.
Performance: Norse Myth, Poetry, Music / Tim Rayborn delves into the ancient spiritual and cultural traditions of Northern Europe to present both reconstructed works and surviving musical fragments from the Viking Age. The Vikings were far more than barbarians and marauders. They were traders, explorers, poets, and masters of sailing. Their literature is remarkable; the Icelandic Sagas are prototypes of the European novel, and the Poetic Edda contains masterpieces of alliterative poetry. Their cosmology was as rich as those of the Greeks or Egyptians, and as explorers they were unmatched, traveling from Scandinavia to as far as North America and Baghdad. This program includes excerpts from the Edda and the Sagas, among other works, and offers both early medieval and traditional melodies from areas as diverse as Iceland, Norway, Shetland, and more. Tim brings to life this heroic era in a stunning one-man performance. Featuring voice, Saami drum, deerskin rattle, Baltic overtone flute, Nordic lyre, and bone flute.
Saturday, February 25, 2017, 10:00 am – noon and 1:30-4:00 pm:
Viking Language and Archaeology in Iceland: The Mosfell Archaeological Project / Jesse Byock (Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies, UCLA). Archeologist Jesse Byock considers two issues: Old Norse language and identity, and recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland. He focuses on excavations at Hrísbrú, the farm of the Mosfell Chieftains, in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley. An interdisciplinary research project employing the tools of archaeology, history, anthropology, forensics, environmental sciences, saga studies, and landscape analysis, MAP is researching the many Viking-age remains in and around the Mosfell, treating this large area as a “Valley System.” MAP’s research at Hrísbrú has led to the discovery of a Viking chieftain’s farmstead with many core features of Viking-age life. The finds include a large longhouse from Iceland’s early settlement period, a pagan cremation grave, a conversion-era stave church, and an early Christian graveyard with pagan features. The finds provide a wealth of new evidence about life in Viking Age Iceland, and tell us a good deal about the Icelandic sagas.
From Frankish Altars to Scottish Fields: Trading, Raiding, and Gift-Giving in the Viking Age /Daniel Melleno (Classics, UC Berkeley). In September of 2014 an amateur treasure hunter in Scotland uncovered an astonishing trove. The Dumfriesshire Hoard contained more than 100 items, including jewelry and coins held in a silver gilded vessel originally used as a communion cup. While the hoard itself dates from the 10th century, the cup is of late 8th or early 9th century origin. How did an 8th century French cup end up filled with silver and buried in a Scottish field? The answer is simple: Vikings. We’re all familiar with the popular image of the Vikings, raiders arriving without warning in their longboats to burn, kill, steal. But the origins of our treasure hoard may not be so simple after all. Daniel Melleno will highlight the variety of ways in which treasures great and small changed hands and what this tells us about peace and war in the Viking Age.
Serpents and Dragons: Motifs and Meanings in Norwegian Designs / Deborah Loft (Art History, College of Marin). The visual creations of the Viking era fused beauty with function; decoration with symbolism. The skills which made the ships and their carvings were also realized in the impressive stave churches, with their exuberant interlace ornament. The motifs of interlaced serpents, dragons, and vines will be traced to their ancient origins, which shed light on their possible meanings. These productions offer an opportunity to consider the interactions of the Vikings with other cultures. While full of meaning for the people who used them, the surviving examples rarely focused on human narrative. This is one likely explanation for their obscure status in the art historical “canon”. It is time to reconsider their place in the history of art and culture.
The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods / Jonas Wellendorf (Old Norse Studies, UC Berkeley). The mythology of the North contains some bright and happy moments, but in comparison with its Classical counterparts, Scandinavian mythology is distinctively dark and gloomy. The Norse gods and their creation, our world, are bound to perish in the great battle at the end of times (Ragnarök). There is a promise of rebirth after the destruction, but the new world will have no room for the likes of Odin and Thor. Who were the Scandinavian gods, how do we know them? Why did such a terrible end await them? And which gods would survive Ragnarök? This talk will consider the emergence of the grand story of the lives and deaths of the Norse gods and seek to provide answers to these questions.
Panel Discussion with the presenters, moderated by Fred Astren
Vienna on the Verge (1890-1918) | November 4-5, 2016
November 4-5, 2016
Under a well-meaning but conflict-ridden imperial government, a deep fault line had emerged in Central Europe’s capital by the end of the 19th century. The public life of Vienna—its demographics and politics—had changed profoundly, and its cultural life—architecture, music, visual arts, and literature—both reflected and contributed to the upheaval. By 1900, the clash of polarities between tradition and the new had transformed Vienna from a proud and open metropolis to a city psychically troubled. Humanities West explores the modernist side of Vienna’s split personality, when a conflicted Vienna gave birth to emergent modernism and some of Europe’s greatest artistic treasures.
“Vienna, that scrollworked bastion, smoldered with more demons of the future than the most forward-minded cities of the West.” Frederick Morton, A Nervous Splendor
Friday, November 4, 2016, 7:30 to 9:30 pm.
Late Imperial Vienna: A metropolis of contrasts and conflicts / Gary Cohen (History, U Minnesota Twin Cities). We see Vienna around 1900 as a major cradle of twentieth-century modernist Western culture. Other major cities also gave birth to modernist breakthroughs, but Vienna produced a particularly rich concentration of innovators in psychology, philosophy, economics, architecture, art, music, and literature. The stark contrasts and conflicts of life in Vienna 1900 gave impetus to modernist innovations. The city enjoyed a rich cultural heritage, and its two million residents came from all over the multinational Habsburg Empire. The belated development of modern finance, industry, and commerce left small farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers reeling. The old pillars of Austrian society—the Habsburg dynasty, the aristocracy, and the Catholic Church—remained, but the democratizing forces of socialism, populist radical nationalism, and Christian Social politics challenged them. Many enjoyed the comforts of Viennese cafes and walks in the Vienna woods, but reports of labor protests, nationalist demonstrations, and mayhem in parliament filled the newspapers long before the catastrophe of World War I.
Lecture/Performance: City of Musics: The Twilight of Tonality / Bruce Lamott (Philharmonia Baroque). Vienna, the City of Music, became a City of Musics when the classicism of Brahms, the futurism of Wagner, the expressionism of an audacious new generation, and the nostalgia of operetta collided at the end of the 19th century. Viennese audiences could suit their taste with an unprecedented variety of musical styles, but often defended their choices with spirited and sometimes amusing fervor. Featuring chamber music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, and Oscar Straus, with Helene Zindarsian (soprano), Robert Howard (cello), Keisuke Nakagoshi (piano).
Saturday, November 5, 2016, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 – 4:00 pm
Literary Modernism in Austria / David Luft (Humanities, Oregon State U). The discussion of Vienna 1900 has been powerfully shaped by Carl Schorske’s analysis of the liberal era in Vienna and by his strong interests in music and the visual arts, as well as psychoanalysis. Professor Luft shifts the emphasis away from the aestheticism and decadence of the fin-de-siècle to the early 20th century, especially “the generation of 1905.” He underscores the powerful role of literary modernism in this generation and points to the broader context of Viennese intellectual life in Austria, positing an ethical vision of literature and its possibilities for transforming modern life. He emphasizes the roles of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Austrian intellectual life after 1900—not only for the novelists, but for Wittgenstein and Freud as well. The essayists and novelists of early twentieth-century Austria represent a highpoint of the German language and one of the great moments of world literature.
Change from the Margins: Women, Jews, and Everyday Life in fin-de-siècle Vienna / Lisa Silverman (History, U of Wisconsin Milwaukee). Although best known for its world-renowned innovations in music, art, science, literature, fin de siècle Vienna was also shaped by the everyday lives of those who developed and sustained its social, cultural, and intellectual currents. Professor Silverman examines the ways in which cultural motifs shaped how Austrians articulated their responses to society’s changing conditions. Often, those without power, including women and Jews, successfully adapted to or resisted on a daily basis the rapidly changing ideologies around them. An examination of their experiences reveals that everyday life can be a fascinating and important basis for understanding social change.
Passion, Obsession and Betrayal: The Art of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoshka / Kayleen Asbo (Psychology and Music, SF Conservatory of Music). While on the surface the works of the two most scandalous painters of fin-de-siècle Vienna could not be more different in technique and style, Symbolist Gustav Klimt and Expressionist Oskar Kokoshka both were driven to depict Eros and Tod (death), the twin drives that Freud was to famously posit as the basis for civilization. Both men also shared an obsessive fascination with Alma Mahler, who became the muse for their creations as well as the cause of their most infamous behavior. From the glittering mosaics of golden women to the raw and blistering Bride of the Wind, the intensely erotic portraits of the feminine by both artists were laced with symbols of death, doom and despair.
The Question of Art in Viennese Architecture /Mitchell Schwarzer (California College of the Arts). At the turn of the twentieth century, several Viennese architects proclaimed that the status of art within architecture had reached a point of crisis. Among them, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Adolf Loos agreed that the transformations of industrial culture—rail transportation, factory production, urban commerce, and middle-class social dynamics—demanded artistic responses from architects that went far beyond the surfacing of buildings in costumes of historical ornament. But how could art’s role in building design be reinvented? This lecture explores three astonishingly different solutions to this question: Wagner’s aim to develop ornamental responses in parallel with iron technology; Hoffmann’s proposal to harmonize aesthetically all aspects of building and life; and, finally, Loos’s manifesto to banish art from architecture.
Bernini’s Rome: Art and Architecture of the Baroque
April 26–27, 2013
Marines’ Memorial Theatre, San Francisco
5 lectures and 1 performance. Enjoying the patronage of Popes and the wealth of the resurgent Counter-Reformation Church, Bernini used his immense talents as an architect, painter, and especially as a sculptor to help define the unique visual style of the Baroque Age. In seventeenth-century Rome, designed by far-sighted urban planners in the shape of a star, Bernini and his collaborators and rivals restored a monumental grandeur to the Eternal City that still survives.
Friday, April 26, 2013, 7:30 to 10 pm
Bernini’s Rome.
Theodore Rabb (History, Princeton)
No city has had as many Golden Ages as Rome. The decades when it was transformed by Bernini and his contemporaries became at least Rome’s third experience of an astonishing outburst of creativity. During these years its people transformed the physical appearance of the city, as well as the esthetics of European art and architecture; they confronted new ways of exploring nature; and they struggled to make their way as the greatest powers of the day vied for control of the volatile city. The lecture sets the scene for the closer look at some of the achievements of the time that will occupy the rest of the program. Putting in context the leading figures in the church, in politics, in the arts, and in the world of ideas, it also suggests how people made a living, and how the nature of patronage and authority helped shape this Golden Age.
20-Minute Intermission
Performance: Performance: Music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (harpsichord), and Giulio Caccini.Corey Jamason (harpsichord), with lutenist Richard Savino and soprano Céline Ricci. Introduced by Kip Cranna.
Saturday, April 27, 2013, 10 am to noon and 1:30 to 4 pm
Welcome
Bernini and Borromini: Architecture, Patronage and Power in Baroque Rome. Max Grossman (Art History, University of Texas, El Paso)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, the two most celebrated architects of seventeenth-century Rome, promoted completely different architectural visions at a time when the Catholic Church was struggling to redefine and reassert itself in the face of the Protestant threat. Bernini, the charming courtier and eminent sculptor, embraced a refined and purified classicism that he first employed in the facade of Santa Bibiana and later culminated in his monumental colonnades for St. Peter’s Square. Borromini, the irascible and melancholic scholar-architect, developed a highly idiosyncratic style that relied upon advanced geometrical calculations and radical experimentation. His first independent commission, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, and subsequent projects, especially Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, represented an iconoclastic alternative to Bernini’s minimalist Renaissance-inspired designs. In spite of their early collaboration, the two men became locked in a bitter competition for the patronage of popes and cardinals that spanned their careers.
20-Minute Intermission
Theatrical Sculptor: Bernini’s Appeal to the Senses. Deborah Loft (Art History, College of Marin)
Bernini’s range as an artist was all-inclusive. He seems to have drawn no lines between his work as a theatrical designer, architect, sculptor, and (when time permitted), painter. More than any sculptor before him, he presented his marble works in settings which made use of the surrounding spaces (whether created by him, or the actual street-spaces of Rome) in a way that communicated with the space of the viewer. While his stage designs survive only in vivid descriptions, a parallel love of illusionism informs his sculptural works, with their mixed materials, and balance of classical idealism and emotional and fleshly realism. He also went beyond previous sculpture in finding ways to invest a static medium with the effect of dramatic motion. As a devout Catholic, he used these means to inspire devotion in others. The fortunate synchronicity of his talents with Counter-Reformation-era patronage provided the support for his ambitious projects.
Lunch Break. Program resumes at 1:30 pm.
From Rome to Paris: Bernini and the Renaissance of Empire in the Age of Louis XIV.Thomas Dandelet (History, UC Berkeley)
This presentation focuses on Bernini as a central protagonist of the Imperial Renaissance in France. More specifically, it will look at Bernini’s close relationship with the court of Louis XIV and the role he played in forging the imperial image of the Sun King. As the French monarchy increasingly cast itself as the successor to ancient Rome, it looked to the Rome of its own day for artistic inspiration and models. Bernini was central to this project as the French king brought him to Paris with the hope of putting him to work on his many projects. While many of the Roman artist’s ideas and projects for Louis XIV were never realized or co-opted by French artists, they nonetheless exercised a major influence on his imperial imagery and architecture.
Intermission
Let Them Eat Obelisks: Kircher, Bernini, and the Egyptian Monuments of Papal Rome Daniel Stolzenberg (History, UC Davis)
Bernini’s obelisks in Piazza Navona and in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva are among the landmark features of Baroque Rome. This lecture reconstructs the fascination with Egypt in the Eternal City and Bernini’s relationship to one of the most interesting and flamboyant figures of mid-seventeenth century Rome: the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80). Kircher’s claims to have probed the mysteries of nature, collected the world in his museum, and unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyphs–and his many other efforts at creating learned spectacle in the city–help us to understand how the inhabitants of Bernini’s Rome understood the meaning of these famous public sculptures and more generally the culture of Rome in the age of Bernini.
Panel Discussion with all presenters
4 pm. Conclusion
Presenters
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.
Thomas Dandelet (PhD, History, UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor of History and Italian Studies, UC Berkeley. He also taught at Princeton and Bard College. His awards and prizes include fellowships from Guggenheim (2008), National Endowment for the Humanities (1998), Spanish Ministry of Culture (1997), Mellon (1994), and Fulbright (1992); the Roland Bainton Prize for best new book in history (2002), and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1999-2000). Selected publications includeSpain in Italy, Politics, Society, and Religion 1500-1700, Ed. with John Marino, 2006-07; “Between Courts: The Colonna Agents in Italy and Iberia, 1555-1600,” in Your Humble Servant. Agents in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Ed. Marike Keblusek et al, 2006; “Rome, 1592: An Introduction to A Newly Discovered Parish Census,” in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2006; “The Spanish Economic Foundations of Renaissance and Baroque Rome,” in Beyond Florence: Rethinking Medieval and Early Modern Italy, 2003; “Politics and the State System after the Habsburg-Valois Wars,” in Early Modern Italy, 2002; Spanish Rome, 1500-1700, 2001.
Max Grossman (MA/PhD, Art History, Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Texas El Paso (UTEP). He formerly taught at San Jose State and Stanford Universities. After seven years in Tuscany, he completed his dissertation on the civic architecture, urbanism and iconography of the Sienese Republic in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. His research focuses on the political iconography of the Sienese commune, as manifested in painting, architecture, sculpture, coinage, seals, and manuscripts. In addition, he is studying the development of the Italian civic palace, from its origins in the 12th century through the Quattrocento, challenging and revising accepted paradigms while forming a new critical apparatus for interpreting the architecture and urbanism of medieval and Renaissance city-states. He has just completed an article, “A Case of Double Identity: The Public and Private Faces of the Palazzo Tolomei in Siena,” and is now starting work on a book, History, Myth and Ideology: The Question of Siena’s Origins.
Corey Jamason (harpsichord) is an active soloist and chamber music collaborator. The LA Times recently stated, “Jamason’s clear-headed performance of the Italian Concerto rang in our ears. . . . navigated easily through the work’s contrapuntal maze and gave it the careful, due balance of objective detachment and lofty passion.” He has collaborated with Jean-Pierre Rampal, Wieland Kuijken, Eva Legêne, Joseph Silverstein, and Marion Verbruggen, and he appears frequently on National Public Radio’s Performance Today. He has performed with the SF Symphony, LA Opera, American Bach Soloists, Musica Angelica, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, El Mundo, and Camerata Pacifica. Festival appearances include the Berkeley, Bloomington, Bach Aria, San Luis Obispo Mozart and Norfolk festivals. He received degrees from Yale, where he was a student of Richard Rephann; SUNY–Purchase; and Indiana University. Recent recordings include performances with the violinist Gilles Apap, El Mundo and American Bach Soloists. In 2007 he was named director of the SF Bach Choir, becoming the 3rd director in the choir’s 76 year history. With Jeffrey Thomas, he is co-director of the American Bach Soloists Summer Academy. Jamason also co-directs Theatre Comique, an ensemble specializing in the recreation of early American Music theatre.
Deborah Loft is Art History Professor at College of Marin, where she has received the Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition, she has worked on the curatorial staff of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and lectured at a variety of Bay Area museums and institutions, including the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, where she gave a lecture on Bernini’s Head of Medusa in 2012. Her long-standing interest in the artistic interaction of European cultures has led her to do research in Italy, on the complex ethnic and artistic history of that country. Her wide-ranging interests include the theater, where she has worked as a costume designer.
Theodore Rabb, Emeritus Professor of History, Princeton, is a specialist in Renaissance and Early Modern European History. He has edited the Journal of Interdisciplinary History since 1970. Publications include Enterprise and Empire (1967); The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975);Renaissance Lives (1993, 2000); Jacobean Gentleman (1998); The Last Days of the Renaissance (2006); and The Artist and the Warrior (2012). In 1993 PBS broadcast the series, Renaissance, for which he was principal historian, and which was nominated for an Emmy. He has lectured widely, and has written for many publications, including Past & Present, Times Literary Supplement, The Art Newspaper, and New York Times. His public service has encompassed working closely with community colleges and chairing both the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
Céline Ricci studied in Paris with Ana Maria Miranda and at the prestigious London Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Selected by conductor William Christie for Les Jardin des Voix, she was named one of opera’s promising new talents in 2005 by Opernwelt. Opernwelt singled out her performance as Arbace in Terradellas’ Artaserse as a “tour de force,” her coloratura abilities “equal to those of Cecilia Bartoli” She appears frequently for the prestigiousLes Arts Florissants. Her discography includes Cirque (2011) and a CD of French melodies (2012). Recent operas include Angelica in Handel’s Orlando(Sacramento Opera), Clitia in Handel’s Teseo (Göttingen-Handel Festival), Handel’s Athalia (Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra), Purcel’s Dido and Aeneas(numerous companies). Collaborating conductors include Nicolas McGegan, Hugo Reyne, Friedmann Layer, P. Cohen-Akenine, Enrique Mazzola, Jean-Christophe Spinosi, Martin Haselbock, Martin Gester, Timm Rolek. Ricci has toured in Berlin, London, Brussels, Israel, and Barcelona, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.
Richard Savino (Doctorate, SUNY) lectures at SF Conservatory of Music, directs ensemble El Mundo, and is Professor of Music at CSU Sacramento. His instructors included Andres Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, Albert Fuller and Jerry Willard. Recordings include guitar music of Johann Kaspar Mertz, Paganini. Giuliani, Santiago de Murcia, Barbara Strozzi, Biagio Marini and Giovanni Buonamente; Venice Before Vivaldi, a Portrait of Giovanni Legrenziand Villancicos y Cantadas; music by the Boccherini Guitar Symphonia and Op. 30 Concerto for Guitar by Mauro Giuliani; Music Fit for a King; andBaroque Guitar Sonatas (1696) of Ludovico Roncalli (2006–07). Savino received a Diapason d’Or from Compact (Paris) and a 10 du Rèpertoire (Paris). He is a principal performer with the Houston Grand Opera, New York Collegium, Portland Baroque Orchestra, SF Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, San Diego Opera, Opera Colorado, Dallas Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. From 1986–98 he directed the CSU Summer Arts Guitar and Lute Institute, and he has been Visiting Artistic Director of Aston Magna Academy and Music Festival at Rutgers. Presently director of the Grammy-nominated ensemble El Mundo, Savino is also an avid writer, published by Cambridge University Press, Editions Chantarelle and Indiana University Press.
Daniel Stolzenberg (PhD, History, Stanford) is Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis. He specializes in European science and scholarship between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with a particular focus on Rome. He is the author of Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, 2013), which examines a Jesuit scholar’s famously quixotic effort to explain the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the seventeenth century, long before the discovery of the Rosetta stone. He is also the editor of The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Stanford, 2001) and has published numerous articles. He is currently working on a history of Orientalist scholarship in Rome from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Charles II: Phoenix of Restoration London
February 22-23, 2013
Marines’ Memorial Theatre, San Francisco
5 lectures and 1 performance. The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 energized London to escape the long shadow of civil war and Puritanism. Although battered by plague and a contested political and religious landscape, Restoration London burst with creative energy. Fueled by the Merrie Monarch’s patronage, the Court at Whitehall became a great cultural center of Europe, providing non-stop intrigue and entertainment. Theatres reopened and women appeared on stage for the first time; accomplished musicians gave the first public concerts. Restoration London also spawned a thriving public sphere, with Court antagonists spewing forth in coffee houses, clubs and newspapers, much to the Court’s chagrin. This artistic (and sometimes lusty) exuberance was matched by scientific and architectural advances, spurred by Charles’s sponsorship of the prestigious Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge – a superior example of the Restoration club. In planning the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, club luminaries fostered not only a more rational and spacious city, but the first political parties, first relatively free press, public patronage of the arts, an explosion of scientific knowledge, and other hallmarks of modernity. It may be that Restoration London invented the Modern world.
Humanities West Board Fellow Dimitrios Latsis has archived selected program materials, including audio of lectures and performances if available, at the non-profit Internet Archive here.
Friday, 7:30 to 10 pm
Welcome
Power, Pomp and Pleasurein the Restoration Court. Robert Bucholz (History, Loyola U Chicago)
We might be tempted to think of the Restoration Court as the equivalent of the White House or Buckingham Palace, but it was much more than that. Charles II’s household was not merely the seat of government, but the social and cultural center of England, its Bloomsbury and Carnegie Hall, the corner of Hollywood and Vine, People magazine and American Idol, the round table of the Algonquin Hotel and the greatest frat party in history. This lecture addresses the personality and predilections of the Merrie Monarch, his cultural and social patronage, and why the Restoration Court became synonymous with scandal and fun: in the words of Walter Bagehot, “the focus where everything fascinating gathered and where everything exciting centred.”
20-Minute Intermission
Performance.Music of Seventeenth-Century London
Saturday 10 am to noon 1:30 to 4 pm
Welcome
London in the Reign of Charles II. Tim Harris (History, Brown University)
The reign of Charles II was a period of recovery and resurgence for London. But it was also a period of coming to terms with the past, of dealing with the legacy of the mid-century revolution. London had led the resistance to the Stuart monarchy and been a hotbed of Puritan radicalism. As the Good Old Cause died an inglorious death, Londoners welcomed back their king in 1660 amidst widespread jubilation, but what sort of monarchy did they want and what would they do if they felt that Charles II was going down the same road as his father Charles I? Professor Harris explores the political and religious divisions that were to tear Restoration London apart, divisions that were to crystallize around the formation of the first political parties in the modern world.
20-Minute Intermission
How I Learned to Love Restoration Theater. Blair Hoxby (English, Stanford)
The Restoration stage is a bundle of contradictions. Plays written by Shakespeare’s generation were now performed in modern, indoor theaters with actresses (rather than boys) playing the female roles. A new age demanded new theater. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies gave place to the libertine sex comedies of authors such as Aphra Behn. His tragedies were overshadowed by heroic plays written according to the rules of Aristotle. What these brutal comedies and high-flown tragedies have in common is their commitment to the passions: their belief that the experience of desire and aversion, joy and despair define us as humans. Restoration theater lays bare human motivation with an objectivity that we still find bracing. But after fifteen years of trying to improve on Shakespeare, some authors began to suspect that he would not again be equaled. Thus the Restoration also prepared the ground for the cult of Shakespeare that would soon sweep the world.
Lunch Break at noon. Program resumes at 1:30 pm
Mistresses, Maidens, and Noble Pictures in Restoration England, 1660-1685. Julia Marciari-Alexander (Deputy Director, San Diego Museum of Art)
This lecture examines some of the spectacular portraits of the most famous women at the court of Charles II of England. These paintings were highly significant within the cultural production at the Restoration court, and, as objects, they reflect both the spirit of the age as well as the individual characters of the women portrayed. These works range from sumptuous full-length oil paintings to intimate, jewel-like miniatures and are among the most beautiful images produced in England between 1660 and 1685. They were – and have since been – collected and displayed with pride in important houses in Great Britain and abroad. By considering the life stories of these remarkable women, Dr. Marciari-Alexander assesses the ways in which these women and their portraits can inform our 21st-century understanding of Restoration culture and the role visual art played in the shaping of this early modern society.
How Strong Coffee and Free Conversation Restored London after Plague and Fire. RobertBucholz (History, Loyola U Chicago)
As the Restoration Court began to decline into insolvency and political isolation, Restoration London saw the rise of new forms of sociability and patronage. Coffee houses, clubs and pleasure-gardens offered all that the Court could (food, drink, entertainment, conversation and networking) without the formality or constraint of a court. These venues promoted free conversation abetted by the rise of the newspaper and essay magazine. The government’s failure to control these new media enabled the dissemination of new ideas in politics and science. Puritan preachers argued that the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666 were punishments for Restoration London’s obsession with pleasure and freedom of speech. But rather than repent, the men who forged these ideas in clubs and coffee houses rebuilt London as a rational and imperial capital. Its symbol was Sir Christopher Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral: baroque yet neo-classical, imposing yet welcoming, everything the new, modern city needed in its parish church.
Stretch break
Panel Discussion with Written Questions from the Audience
Conclusion: 4:00 pm
Presenters
Robert O. Bucholz (Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago) has authored The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture(Stanford, 1993); with Sir John Sainty, KCB, Officials of the Royal Household 1660-1837, 2 vols. (Institute of Historical Research, London, 1997-98); and, with Newton Key, Early-modern England 1485-1714: a Narrative History(Blackwell, 2003). He has taped several series in The Great Courses, all rated highly: History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts; Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World; London: A Short History of the Greatest City in the Western World. His particular interests include early modern Britain, the British Court and Royal Household 1660-1901, and early modern London. His latest projects are Londoners: a Social and Cultural History of the Metropolis 1550-1750 with J.P. Ward (Cambridge, in press) and Power, Pomp and Pleasure: a Political, Social and Cultural History of the British Court 1660-1901 (Oxford, forthcoming).
Tim Harris (PhD, Cambridge) is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History, Brown University). A social historian of politics, his books include London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (1987), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (1990), Politics Under the Later Stuarts(1993), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850 (1995), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1850 (2001), Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 1660-1685 (2005) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 (2006). Recipient of grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, British Academy, Folger Shakespeare Library, Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Huntington Library, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities, he has also held visiting fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford and at Merton College, Oxford, Emmanuel College, Cambridge,and taught at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He edits the book series Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History for Boydell Press and is on the editorial board of the journal History of European Ideas. His study of the Early Stuarts and the Origins of the Civil War is forthcoming at Oxford.
Blair Hoxby (PhD, Yale) is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002), and he is editing a new collection entitled Milton in the Long Restoration. He has published numerous articles on the Restoration stage and, more generally, on tragedy and tragic opera before Mozart. This research should be appearing soon in two books, What Was Tragedy? 1515-1795 and Reading for the Passions: Performing and Interpreting Tragedy and Tragic Opera in the Neo-classical Order.
Praised by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a “master of the scoreʼs wandering and acrobatic itinerary,” Joshua Lee (viola da gamba) performs with some of the world’s leaders in early music. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory and the Longy School of Music, Josh is the founder of Ostraka, and he has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carmel Bach Festival, Musica Angelica, Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Les Délices, and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Josh’s performances have been heard on National Public Radio’s Performance Todayand Harmonia, and he has recorded for Dorian, Koch International and Reference Recordings. In 2011 Josh toured the US and South America forThe Infernal Comedy starring acclaimed actor John Malkovich, and in 2012 Josh directed the fourth Viola da Gamba Society’s Young Playersʼ Weekend.
Rita Lilly (soprano) has appeared as featured soloist with American Boychoir, American Classical and American Symphony Orchestras, Artek, Bachworks, Bach Aria Group, Clarion Music Society, Collegium Antiquum, Concert Royal, Rebel, and the NY Consort of Viols. In the Bay area, Ms. Lilly has been a soloist with AVE, Albany Consort, American Bach Soloists, Bay Choral Guild, Berkeley Early Music Festival, California Bach Society, Chora Nova, City Concert Opera, Magnificat Baroque Ensemble, Musicsources, New Music Works, SF Concert Chorale, SF Renaissance Voices, and Sacramento Baroque. She toured the US and abroad with Waverly Consort. She was featured on WNYC, WNCN, NPR, and Radio-Canada live broadcasts. She made her NY Weill Recital Hall debut in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with Collegium Antiquum. Her recordings include three on EMI; Handel and Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus on Musical Heritage; Scarlatti’s St. Cecilia Mass on Newport Classic; Sowerby’s Medieval Poem on Naxos; a German Baroque Christmas on Musicmasters and Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Patricia Lundberg, PhD is Emerita Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Indiana University Northwest and Executive Director, Humanities West. At IU Northwest she also served as Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, as well as interim Dean and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to joining Humanities West she served as Founding Executive Director of the Center for Regional Excellence and the Center for Cultural Discovery and Learning. Her doctorate is from Loyola University Chicago, where she also earned a BA Summa Cum Laude and a Masters in English. She is the recipient of several grants and awards and has post-doctoral training from Harvard in leadership.
Julia Marciari-Alexander is Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at The San Diego Museum of Art. Earlier, she was Associate Director for Exhibitions and Publications at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). A specialist in the arts and visual culture of Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she holds a PhD in History of Art (Yale) and a MA in French Literature (NYU). In 2001, she curated, with Catharine MacLeod of the National Portrait Gallery, London, Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II and edited the exhibition catalogue. In 2007, she curated, with David Scrase (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge), Howard Hodgkin Paintings 1992-2007, named one of the ten best exhibitions of 2007 by Time. She publishes regularly and has organized and managed numerous exhibitions, among them Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman with the Cincinnati Art Museum, the San Diego installation of which LA Timescritic Christopher Knight named one of his top ten California exhibitions of 2011.
Gilbert Martinez (harpsichord) is Artistic Director of MusicSources, Center for Historically Informed Performance Inc. in Berkeley. In five years as director, he has expanded MusicSources’ concerts into an international series featuring scholars, performers and students from around the world. He studied harpsichord with MusicSources Founder Laurette Goldberg at the SF Conservatory of Music, and subsequently went to Italy to study briefly with Alan Curtis. Mr. Martinez was named assistant conductor to Alan Curtis in the critically acclaimed Berkeley West Edge Opera production of Handel’s “SERSE.” On the MusicSources Concert Series he recently conducted a reconstruction of a Spanish Renaissance vespers service, with music for double and triple choirs of Tomas Luis de Victoria and contemporaries. This coming season he will be performing the complete oeuvre for harpsichord of Jean-Philippe Rameau in concerts in Southern California and Canada. More conducting projects will include Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” and Scarlatti’s “La Guiditta.” More of his activity can be seen at www.musicsources.org.
Paris: American Expatriate Genius
October 19-20, 2012
5 lectures and 2 performances. Postwar Paris, with its tolerant and cosmopolitan atmosphere (and its low cost of living), attracted a startling number of America’s cultural icons to live and work among the European avant-garde in a moveable feast of creativity. The exhilaration of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s inspired talented American expatriates crossing national, cultural, and artistic boundaries to create innovative modern forms of their art. Gertrude Stein’s “Une generation perdue” living on the edge, this generation of American artistic geniuses exuberantly and profoundly influenced literature, art, filmmaking, music, dance, and theater, reshaping twentieth-century American culture.
Friday: 7:30 to 10 pm
Welcome
Paris and the Making of the Modern in the Arts. Donald W. Faulkner. (Director, NY State Writers Institute)
Despite the disastrous impact of the Great War on Europe, Paris became a center for the making of “the modern” in the arts. In the visual arts, expatriates Picasso, Man Ray, and Juan Gris made great art alongside the Frenchman Matisse. In literature major expatriate artists such as Stein, Hemingway, and Joyce encountered Paris-born literary movements like Dadaism and surrealism. A cluster of collaborators including Diaghilev, Stravinksy, Nijinsky, and Debussy dominated theater, music, and dance. Creativity abounded in jazz, film and the architecture of designs in clothing, furniture, and everyday appliances. Paris in the early twentieth century was a receptive and influencing ground for energy, innovation, and the cross-fertilization of ideas. Professor Faulkner paints a portrait of an open city, a living and vibrant culture, and the people, especially from America, who came there to change the world of art and in the process change themselves.
20-minute Intermission
Performance: Virgil Thomson’s Portraits. Luciano Chessa (SF Conservatory of Music)
introduces us to Virgil Thomson through his direct experience working on Thomson’s music for Chessa’s new opera A Heavenly Act, a contemporary homage to Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. A Heavenly Act and Four Saints share a Gertrude Stein libretto, and both were presented by SFMOMA with the Ensemble Parallèle at the Novellus Theater of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in August 2011. Chessa performs some of Thomson’s chamber scores for piano, as well as music that influenced Thomson (Erik Satie’s Le Piège de Méduse) and music that Thomson influenced (Chessa’s Saint Teresa I’s Aria from A Heavenly Act). With Heidi Moss (soprano) and Benjamin Kreith (violin).
Saturday, 10 am to noon and 1:30-4:30 pm.
Welcome
“America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” Gertrude Stein: Transatlantic Artist, Mentor, and Muse. Wanda M. Corn (Art History, Stanford)
Though she visited her native land only once during four decades of expatriation in France, Gertrude Stein led a bi-continental life. Never assimilating fully to her adopted country, she built a reputation as an accomplished American writer, collector, and doyenne in Paris. She became a major cultural conduit between young American writers, artists, and composers and their European counterparts. Between the two world wars, Americans eagerly sought Stein’s approval and the benefit of her international connections. This lecture focuses on Stein’s rise to prominence in Paris and on her American admirers and protegés, including Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Carl Van Vechten, and Virgil Thomson.
20-minute intermission
“Becoming a Modern Artist”: the Paris Angle. Deborah Loft (Art History, College of Marin)
Paris in the Twenties and Thirties was a magnet for many gifted American visual artists, and had a defining effect on some. Arriving in a Paris which was intrigued by American culture, they found new stimulation, support, and freedom for their work and their lives. The experience of each artist was strongly individual. As a way of exploring a spectrum of experiences, identities, and visual media, we will explore the role which Paris played in the art of Man Ray, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Isamu Noguchi, with a briefer look at others who made the journey.
12 noon Lunch Break. Program resumes at 1:30 pm. Paris Portraits. Laura Sheppard (actress) brings to life the voice of Harriet Lane Levy, a popular San Francisco culture and drama critic for the literary journal The Wave and later for The Call. In 1907 she moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas and found herself immersed in a strange and vibrant world. In her sparkling Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Their Circle, Levy tells of her initiation into the Parisian lifestyle and salons of the Steins (Gertrude and brother Leo, Michael and wife Sarah), the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse, wild nights in Montmartre, and her own discoveries as a single woman abroad. Her portrait of Paris is simultaneously grand and intimate. Harriet’s paintings, including The Girl with Green Eyes by Matisse and Scène de Rue by Picasso, are at SFMOMA. This salon performance is directed and designed by Suzanne Stassevich. PianistKaren Rosenak provides accompaniment, playing the music of Erik Satie and other composers of that era.
At Home Far Away: African Americans in Paris. Tyler Stovall (History, UC Berkeley)
Dean Stovall considers the history of black American expatriates in Paris during the twentieth century. Starting with the first world war, he discusses how African Americans were able to create a sense of community, and ultimately of tradition, in the French capitol. Dean Stovall considers two periods in particular. The first, the 1920s and 1930s, looks at the arrival of jazz in Paris and the establishment of a community of black performers in Montmartre, paying particular attention to Josephine Baker and Bricktop as icons of that community. The second focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, exploring the colony of writers and political activists centered around Richard Wright on the Left Bank. Both the civil rights movement at home and the Algerian war in France forced expatriates to rethink their lives in Paris.
Intermission
A Literary Revolution: The Expatriate Press in Paris. Donald W. Faulkner (Director, NY State Writers Institute)
Few American (or English-speaking) writers in Paris in the 1920s and 30s would ever have been discovered, let alone read, were it not for the small presses there. Only San Francisco’s publishers in the 1950s through the 70s (and some would say still) rival the small press revolution in Paris in the 20s. Many know of Sylvia Beach’s work at Shakespeare and Company to publish James Joyce’sUlysses, but few realize that outside of F. Scott Fitzgerald virtually no American expatriate in Paris had any hope of getting published in the United States. Professor Faulkner profiles writers Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Stein, Eliot, Pound, and Henry Miller; and publishers like Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press, Caresse and Harry Crosby and The Black Sun Press, William Bird and Three Mountains Press, Maurice Girodias and Obelisk Press, and Sylvia Beach. In Paris, the lack of censorship and the access of writers to their publishers made American literature in the twentieth century.
Concluding Panel Discussion
Conclusion: 4:30 pm
Presenters
As a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist, 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.
Wanda Corn, PhD, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita of Art History, Stanford University, curated a 2011 exhibition and book–Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories–for the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Her museum exhibitions and books include The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (1973); and Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983). In 2005-06, she transformed her major study, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35 (UC Press, 1999), into a museum exhibition. Dr. Corn’s scholarship on transatlantic modernism focuses on the exchanges and interdependencies of modern artists in Paris and New York, conceptualizing an Atlantic rim ofavant-garde culture. She has just completed a book on the decorations woman artists made for the 1893 Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
New York State Writers Institute Director Donald W. Faulkner, an authority on Lost Generation and Beat Generation writers, is a featured commentator in the PBS documentary “Paris: The Luminous Years,” and in the A&E Biography/Crisman Films documentary, “The Lost Generation.” Faulkner has published two collections of poems, and has edited four books of writings by eminent literary critic Malcolm Cowley, including The Portable Cowley, The Penguin 20th Century ClassicsEdition of Exile’s Return, and Malcolm Cowley on New England Writers and Writing. He is a former director of the University at Albany’s Center for Arts and Humanities, and an associate professor of English. In addition to being the interviewer-of-record for more than 1,000 hours of Writers Institute archive recordings of visiting writers, and the host of more than 100 on-stage interviews, Faulkner is the director and executive producer of films made from archive materials. Faulkner is currently at work on a memoir of his Writers Institute experiences.
Violinist Benjamin Kreith recently spent several years in Montana playing and teaching as a member of the Cascade Quartet and concertmaster of the Great Falls Symphony. He has performed as a guest artist with the Ying and Muir Quartets and premiered solo works at the festivals in Strasbourg and Marseille. Kreith helped to found the Ensemble CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, which worked with distinguished composers including Francisco Guerrero and Magnus Lindberg. His live recording of Christian Lauba’sKwintus for violin solo is available on the Accord/Universal CD Morphing.
Deborah Loft is Art History Professor at College of Marin, where she has received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Prior to that, her work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco included assisting Wanda Corn on the exhibitions The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1890-1910 (1972) andThe Art of Andrew Wyeth (1973). She has taught and lectured at Bay Area museums, including the Getting to Know Modern Art series at SFMOMA. She has taught art history at the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, where she has also taken painting classes using plein-airtechniques. On her many visits to Paris, she has made a special point of exploring the neighborhoods where artists of various generations lived, in order to have a better sense of their daily milieu and artistic motifs.
Kerrin Meis received her MA at UC Berkeley. After lecturing at SF State University for many years, she is currently teaching Art History classes for the Emeritus program at the College of Marin and at Book Passage in Corte Madera, where she recently concluded a class: Innocents Abroad: American Artists in Europe and classes on artists working in the South of France . Classes for the OLLI program at Dominican University have included The Art of Islam, Early Medieval Art and The Art of Anatolia: her focus is on the interaction among artists of different cultures made visible in the recurrence of certain symbols and motifs in architecture, painting and sculpture. Kerrin has led travel/study programs in France.
Heidi Moss (Soprano) relocated to the Bay area from NYC in 2003 and has performed with area companies such as West Bay Opera, Pocket Opera, Livermore Opera, Fremont Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Sacramento Choral Society, and the San Francisco Lyric Opera. She also has been a part of the San Francisco Opera family as Rosina in their outreach production ofThe Barber of Seville and with the Adler Fellows in a premiere of Gang Situs opera The Grand Seducers. This past year, she also worked with composer/benefactor Gordon Getty to record his new opera Usher Housewith both the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and the Russian National Orchestra. She was also thrilled to be a part of Ensemble Paralelle and SF MoMA’s groundbreaking production of 4 Saints in 3 Acts in August of 2011.
Karen Rosenak (Pianist) is an almost-native of the Bay Area. She was a founding member and pianist of the Empyrean Ensemble and EARPLAY, two Bay Area new music ensembles. She studied modern piano with Carlo Bussotti and Nate Schwartz, and fortepiano with Margaret Fabrizio. She is currently a full-time senior lecturer at UCB, where she has taught since 1990, and serves on the Board of the Noe Valley Chamber Music series.
Laura Sheppard (Actress) trained professionally in theater and dance and received her BFA in acting from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts. She has extensive background in experimental theater and had her own company, Gestural Theatre, in Boston for many years. Her solo show, Still Life with Stein, based on the writings of Gertrude Stein, toured to festivals in the US and Europe. She has worked as an events producer for over twenty-five years and produced the Earth Day Celebration and Ceremonies in Times Square (1990, New York City) and the Jewish Music Festival (JCCEB and Bay Area locations 1998, 1999). Since 2000 she has worked as Director of Events at the Mechanics’ Institute, San Francisco, where she presents author events and cultural programs. She continues to create and perform dramatic readings inspired by writers and great literature.
Suzanne Stassevitch (Designer, Director) developed an interest in theatrical productions based on literature and poetry while studying at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She later received her MA in theater and directing from San Francisco State College. She worked with the San Francisco Opera for twenty-two years as head of wardrobe and was costume supervisor for many productions abroad. Suzanne collaborated with Laura Sheppard in 2007 as a directing consultant and as set and costume designer for the remounted production of Still Life with Stein. In 2008 she directed a staged reading of stories by William Saroyan for A Salute to Saroyan at the Mechanics’ Institute Library. Suzanne continues to pursue a lifelong passion for costumes and textiles with her own work. She is a member of the board of the Textile Arts Council at San Francisco Fine Arts Museum.
Tyler Stovall is a professor of French history and Dean of the Undergraduate Division at UC Berkeley. He has written several books and articles on the subject of modern French history, focusing on race, labor, colonialism and post-colonialism. Major publications include The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (1990), Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light(1996), and The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (co-edited with Sue Peabody, 2003). A new book, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism, and Revolution, is forthcoming from Cambridge in 2012. Professor Stovall is currently working on a textbook entitledUniversal Nation: a transnational history of modern France. He serves on the Humanities West Board of Directors.
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.
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. AmericanJournal 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
Performanceand 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.
Minoan Crete: The Dawn of European Civilization
April 29–30, 2011
A prosperous maritime society flourished on Bronze Age Crete from ~2700 to ~1400 BCE, a thousand years before classical Greek civilization. Egyptian records, paintings of Cretans bearing gifts to the Pharaoh, and Minoan paintings found in Egypt testify to this brilliant culture. The magnificence of its art and architecture and the sophistication of the urban culture of Knossos on Crete were not rediscovered until British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans undertook the excavation and controversial reconstruction of Knossos from 1901-1930. The resulting images of a peaceful, matriarchal society have been increasingly challenged, with archaeological finds in Crete and Santorini that showcase Minoan Crete as a flourishing sea empire. A devastating volcanic eruption at nearby Thera (Santorini), followed by a tsunami, destroyed its navy and economy, triggering its gradual collapse. In the 14th century BCE came influential interaction with the Mycenaean culture developing on the Greek mainland and a shift in power that transmitted and transformed Minoan culture onto the European continent and into a palatial empire that marks the end of one fascinating story and the beginning of yet another.
Sponsored by the Consul General of Greece; the Center for Modern Greek Studies and Classics Department at San Francisco State University; Stanford University; UC Berkeley
Moderator: Kim Shelton (Classics; Director, Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, UC Berkeley)
Friday, April 29, 2011, 8:00 to10:15 pm
Opening Remarks Ioannis Andreades (Consul General of Greece in San Francisco)
Excavating in Santorini Xenia Stefanidou (Ambassador of Greece to the Philippines) Ambassador Stefanidou reflects on her experience excavating ancient archeological sites on Santorini.
Knossos and the Making of Minoan Civilization: a Century of Bronze Age Archaeology Eleni Hatzaki (Classics, University of Cincinnati) On March 23, 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began excavating the largest prehistoric building in Crete and the Aegean, which he named Palace of Minos at Knossos. The unparalleled craftsmanship of local and imported material culture, combined with Evans’s definitive scholarship, has much shaped our understanding of Europe’s first civilization. Professor Hatzaki explores, critiques, and evaluates 100 years of Knossian and Minoan archaeology in the context of Bronze Age Crete, the Aegean, and the East Mediterranean.
Performance Mezzo soprano Lauren Groff performs Monteverdi’s “Lamento d’Arianna,” the aria from the lost opera Arianna, and Haydn’s solo cantata “Arianna a Naxos,” with piano accompaniment. Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna (SF Opera).
Enomenoi Dancers of the Church of the Holy Cross, Belmont, California.
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm
Explaining the Minoan Miracle Ian Morris (Classics and History, Stanford University) Minoan Crete was an amazing place: between 1800 and 1600 BCE its people ate better, lived longer, and inhabited bigger, more comfortable houses than Cretans ever had before or would have again for centuries. Why? By looking at Minoan Crete against the background of other moments when ancient Greeks lived unusually well (particularly 600-300 BCE and 400-600 CE), we see the answer—geography. The Aegean world began each of these eras as a backwater on the fringes of a more dynamic core in the east Mediterranean. As the core expanded, the Aegean world was drawn in, setting off economic and cultural explosions from its advantageous position on the periphery. Similar growth has happened throughout history, not least to northwest Europe and then North America after about 1600 CE. Only by looking at the Minoan Miracle in a global framework can we make sense of what happened there–and gain a whole new way to see our own times.
The World of Minoan Art: Sacred Landscapes and Nature; Gods and Man; Daily Life and Epic Vance Watrous (Art History, SUNY Buffalo) During the Late Bronze Age (1700-1400 BCE), the civilization of Minoan Crete was part of an international era that included the entire Eastern Mediterranean – the Aegean, Levant and Egypt. Famous as craftsmen, Cretan artists created wall paintings, jewelry, vases and seals. Of exquisite quality, this art still has the power to affect us today. In the Bronze Age, Minoan seafarers travelled widely and absorbed the artworks they saw in their journeys. Details in their art were clearly derived from the Near East, especially from Egypt. Nevertheless, when we turn from the art of Egypt and the Levant to Crete, nothing prepares us for what we see. We pass into a land of enchantment, into a world that is sensuous, alive, full of wonder and spirituality. Minoan art depicts landscapes and nature as well as gods and man, and epic themes of war and peace in which we can detect the very beginnings of Western art.
Lunch Break
Plato’s Myth of Lost Atlantis Andrew Jameson (Emeritus, History, Harvard University and UC Berkeley) Lost Atlantis, one of the most exasperating mysteries of human history, was born in the mind of Greek philosopher Plato. In two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias,Plato originated the idea, the legend, and the mystery of an advanced civilization “destroyed by a huge natural catastrophe.” Since antiquity many have tried to find Atlantis and date its destruction. The search has involved many disciplines: geology and archeology, ethnology and linguistics, mysticism and occultism, and the natural and psychological sciences. Ever since Greek archeologist Spyridon Marinatos proposed in 1939 that the Bronze Age eruption of Santorini (ancient Thera) was responsible for the demise of the Minoan Crete civilization, geologists and archeologists have studied the volcanic eruptions of the island, leading some to conclude that Santorini is the antecedent of Plato’s Atlantis. Thousands of works have been written about Atlantis in the scientific literature and in bestsellers of popular science, much of it characterized by myth, legend, and fantasy. Lost Atlantis has become a legendary symbol of the human search for a lost “cradle of human culture.”
The End of the Minoan Story and the Beginning of the Mycenaean Kim Shelton (Classics; Director, Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, UC Berkeley). The Mycenaean Greeks rose to power on the mainland and in the Aegean during and after the collapse of the Minoan civilization. The interaction between these two cultures helped define not only the nature of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean but also the legacy of prehistoric and pre-Hellenic civilization to the later Greeks of the historical period. The Mycenaeans lived at Knossos before its destruction in the middle of the 14th century BCE. Mycenaean art and society were strongly influenced by Minoan culture at several essential phases, while the concept of “Mycenaean” Crete and what that means for our understanding of the Minoans themselves and the implications for the first Greeks on the mainland as they develop into a palatial empire is the end of one fascinating story and the beginning of yet another.
Panel Discussion with All Presenters
Presenters
Mezzo-soprano Lauren Groff completed her master’s degree in Vocal Performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2008, studying under Catherine Cook. Ms. Groff completed her undergraduate studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she performed the role of Dido, (Dido and Aeneas) and was part of the chorus for Pacific Repertory Opera. Her roles in the Bay Area have included Hänsel (Hänsel and Gretel), Hippolyta (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Claudio (Silla-US Premiere), Meg (Little Women), and Lidio (L’Egisto-Cavalli). A frequent soloist, her concert credits include Respighi’s Laud to the Nativity, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Handel’s Messiah, and Mozart’s Grand Mass in C-minor. Ms. Groff made her Bay Area opera debut with Festival Opera as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her future engagements include a concert version of Carmen with the San Jose Youth Symphony (title role), Bay Area appearances in Handel’s Messiah, soloist appearances with the Valley Concert Chorale, and a soloist with the SF Concert Chorale in Saint-Saens Christmas Oratorio.
Mary Louise Hart, Associate Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Eleni Hatzaki (Assistant Professor, Classics, University of Cincinnati) is an Aegean Pre-historian working on Crete with research interests in the archaeology of Prehistoric Knossos, ceramic production and consumption, burial customs and society, the archaeology of urban complexity, and household archaeology. She came to University of Cincinnati from the British School at Athens where she held the academic positions of Assistant Director and Knossos Curator. In Greece she has directed two excavation projects (Little Palace North Project and Villa Dionysos Viridarium Project) at the quintessential Bronze Age site of Knossos, Crete. Her long-standing academic association with Knossos (urban development, labyrinthine stratigraphy, pottery, and architecture) started while a graduate student of Mervyn Popham, who suggested the Little Palace (excavated in the 1900s by Arthur Evans) as a suitable Oxford D.Phil. thesis. Apart from Knossos she has participated in numerous fieldwork projects in Greece: Palaikastro, Myrtos Pyrgos, Malia on Crete, Lefkandi and Phylla on Euboea, Kythera and Dokos (islands off the Peloponnese). Publications include the Late Bronze Age (MM IIIB to LM IIIC) chapters of the Knossos Pottery Handbook ( Momigliano ed. 2007); Knossos: the Little Palace (Hatzaki 2005); Knossos: Palace, City, State (Cadogan, Hatzaki and Vasilakis, eds. 2004). Current projects include the Little Palace North Project (now at post-excavation study season phase); publication of the Late Bronze Age ceramic assemblages from the ‘Minoan’ settlement and House Tomb of Myrtos Pyrgos (excavated in the 1970s by Gerald Cadogan); and publication of the Temple Tomb at Knossos (excavated in the 1930s by Evans and John Pendlebury).
Andrew G. Jameson (PhD, History, Harvard; doctorate, History, The Sorbonne, Paris; MS, Library Science, Simmons; Archival Management, Radcliffe) taught Byzantine, Near Eastern, and African history at Harvard and UC Berkeley. He is Director Emeritus of Books for Asia of The Asia Foundation and President Emeritus of The Academy of Art SF. He was advisor to the National Libraries of Nigeria and China, visiting professor at Bosphorus University and advisor to the library of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul-Constantinople. He lectures and writes on African and Asian cultures, on libraries, and on the Orthodox Church and monasteries; he is researching a book on the Nicene Creed and on the history and lore of the camel. He serves on Harvard’s Graduate Council, as a trustee of the William Saroyan Foundation, and as historian of the Bohemian Club of SF. He was recently elected to the Explorers Club of New York, having climbed Mounts Kilimanjaro and Cameroon and trekked the Sahara with the Tuareg. AWorld War II infantry veteran, he earned a Bronze Star with Cluster and a Purple Heart with Cluster in the Battle of the Bulge.
Ian Morris (Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Stanford University) is an archaeologist and historian who has dug in Britain, Greece, and Italy. He has published eleven books. The latest of these, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, examines eastern and western history from the Ice Age into the twenty-first century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2010. At Stanford he has served as Chair of the Classics Department, Senior Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, Director of the Archaeology Center, and Director of the Social Science History Institute, and in 2009 he won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. From 2000 through 2006 he directed Stanford’s excavations at Monte Polizzo, an indigenous town in Sicily, uncovering new evidence about the transformation of Mediterranean societies in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. His books have been translated into Spanish, Greek German, and Dutch, and he has appeared on numerous television specials.
Kim Shelton (Assistant Professor, Classics, and Director, Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, UC Berkeley) is an active field archaeologist and Pre-historian with excavations at Petsas House in the settlement of Mycenae and in and around the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. She is a specialist in ceramics, domestic architecture and Mycenaean religion. She came to UC Berkeley from the University of Texas at Austin following twelve years of field research in Greece, primarily at the Late Bronze Age palatial center of Mycenae where she remains the assistant to the director of the Archaeological Society of Athens’ research, Dr. Spyros Iakovidis. She has also participated in fieldwork and specialist study in Greece at the Mycenaean stronghold of Gla, at Pylos, Tegea, the shipwreck site of Iria and now in the sanctuary area and the settlement on Tsoungiza at Nemea. Publications include The Late Helladic Pottery from Prosymna (1996), the chapter on Late Bronze Age Mainland Greece for the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (E. Cline, ed. Forthcoming) and numerous articles on the Petsas House excavations and the major finds (pottery, frescoes, Linear B tablets). Currently she is researching ceramic deposits from the UCB Nemea Excavations (1972-2002) for publication and finishing two books: one on the figurines of Petsas House (Archaeological Society) and the other the final publication of the Tsountas House excavations (Oxbow Books) conducted by the British School of Archaeology in 1950, 1959-1960. In 2009 she was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Xenia Stefanidou (Greek Ambassador to Philippines), a native Athenian, is a BA graduate of the School of Archeology and History of the University of Athens. In 2005, she completed her Masters in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. A nine-year stint in archeology led to an interest in diplomacy. After completing her studies in the Diplomatic Academy in 1984, she served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens whereupon she was assigned to Bonn, Germany to serve as Secretary of Embassy, then to Plovidiv, Bulgaria where she served as Consul General at the Consulate General of Greece. Returning to Athens, she served in several political departments at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2004, Mrs. Stefanidou was detached to the Consulate General of Greece in Boston, and in September of 2005, she assumed her duties as the Consul General of Greece in San Francisco. In 2009 she was named Ambassador of the Republic of Greece to the Philippines. In 1995, she was decorated with the “Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany” by the German Ambassador in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is fluent in six languages—Greek, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.
Livingston Vance Watrous (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Art History; Adjunct Professor of Classics; Adjunct Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo. Professor Watrous’ interests include Aegean and Greek art and archaeology. He is particularly interested in iconography (mainly as it relates to Greek poetry) and the relationship between society, social institutions and art. He has recently published articles on the archaeology of Crete, and on the earliest architectural sculpture known in Greece. Recent publications include Plain of Phaistos: Cycles of Social Complexity in the Messara Region of Crete, 2006; The Cave Sanctuary of Zeus at Psychro: A Study of Extra-Urban Sanctuaries in Minoan and Early Iron Age Crete. University of Texas at Austin, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, 1996; Kommos III, The Late Bronze Age Pottery, Princeton University Press, 1992. He is Director of the Gournia Survey Project, important for its new information about one of the most significant excavations of a town in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. He has received grants from the Archaeological Institute of America, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic Society, Fulbright commission, and Institute for Aegean Studies to support his archaeological fieldwork and studies on Minoan Crete. In 1993/94 he was Elizabeth A. Whitehead Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Toledo: The Multicultural Challenges of Medieval Spain
February 4–5, 2011
For centuries under both Moorish and Spanish rule, Toledo thrived as a cultural, religious, and political center for its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. Its artists influenced one another, blending styles in art and architecture, and remained influential enough to still attract El Greco late in the 16th Century. Its philosophers and scientists created a vibrant center of learning, while Latin translations of major Arabic works spread Toledo’s influence throughout Medieval Europe. Does Toledo deserve its reputation as a showcase of “Convivencia,” the relatively tolerant and synergistic co-existence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews? Or was its greatness the paradoxical result of tensions and conflicts that simmered beneath the surface until finally boiling over with the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502)?
Moderator: Fred Astren (Professor and Chair, Department of Jewish Studies Member, Faculty in Middle East and Islamic Studies, San Francisco State University)
Friday, February 4, 2011, 8:00 to 10:15 pm
The Place of Toledo in Spanish History Teofilo Ruiz (Professor of History, UCLA) provides a broad view of the history of Toledo from its Roman foundation to the aftermath of the conquest of the city by the Christian armies of Alfonso VI in 1085. Emphasis is on the Visigothic presence in the city, the role of Toledo as the capital of the Visigothic empire, as primate Church in early modern Spain, as well as on the great Church councils held in the city. In many ways, the edicts of these councils eerily foreshadowed later harsh legislation against Muslims and Jews in the mid-thirteenth century. Focusing on discreet aspects of Toledo’s history and on its unique location in the center of the peninsula, Professor Ruiz also explores the contradictions inherent in Alfonso VI’s definition of himself as the emperor of the three religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) and the parallel development: the growing antagonisms between different religious groups in the city and the realm.
Performance
Soprano Susan Rode-Morris, percussionist Peter Maund, viola-da-gambist David Morris, and vielle/violinist Shira Kammen present a program indicative of the astonishing diversity of the music of late Medieval and Renaissance Toledo and Spain. From the Spanish secular storytelling villancicos to Sephardic love songs and laments, to the Moorish muwashah, this concert explores the rich and unusual meeting of cultures which culminated in a fascinating world. Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna (Director of Musical Administration, SF Opera)
Performance
Multicultural Challenges of Medieval Spain. SpanishVillancicos, Sephardic Love Songs, and Moorish Muwashah of Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Shira Kammen (vielle/violin), Susan Rode Morris (soprano), David Morris (viola da gamba), and Peter Maund (percussion).
Cantiga de Santa Maria #212
from the Court of Alphonso X “El Sabio” (1221–1284)
Una Matica
Anonymous, Sephardic
Salinas
based on melodies by Francisco de Salinas (1513–1590)
Alta Alta
Anonymous, Sephardic
Istihal NawaAthar and Lamma Bada Yatathanna
Traditional Arabic Muwashshah
Amor con Fortuna
Juan del Encina (1468–1529 or 1530)
Recercada
Diego Ortiz (ca. 1510–ca. 1570)
Puer Natus Est
Cristobal de Morales (ca. 1500– ca.1553)
Calata ala Spagnola
Juan Ambrosio Dalza (fl. 1508)
Tres Morillas me enamoran en Jaen
Villancico Anónimo
Jancu Janto
Anonymous
Saturday, February 5, 2011, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm
From Difference to Deviance in Early Modern Toledo Mary Elizabeth Perry (Research Associate, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies). The Purity of Blood Statute passed by the city government of Toledo in 1449 signaled a major change from past toleration of difference to official condemnation of difference as deviance. Originally aimed at judeo-conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity), this law reflected a larger concern about growing challenges to a ruling elite. Historical records, literature, art, and architecture of Toledo expose deep anxieties about not only judeo-conversos, but also moriscos (Muslims who had to convert to Christianity in the early 16th century), the poor, the infirm, and prostitutes.
Toledo’s Visual Interlace Deborah Loft (Art History Professor, College of Marin). Toledo offers a rich opportunity to explore artistic interchange across lines of political power. Works of art ranging from medieval mosques, synagogues, and churches to the paintings of El Greco—himself a product of several cultures—reflect the city’s complex cultural relationships. The “Cristo de la Luz” mosque and the “Santa Maria la Blanca” and “Il Tránsito” synagogues are considered in the broader context of the Iberian Peninsula and as contributions to European art down to modern times. Toledo is also viewed through the paintings and projects of El Greco, for whom the city provided the patronage for his distinctive later work.
Lunch Break
Performance Orphenica Lyra: Orpheus’ Lyre in Spain Virtuoso guitarist Richard Savino (Professor of Music, CSU Sacramento) captures the spontaneity of Spanish period music on the guitar and vuihuela, el rey de los renacimiento intrumentos español(the king of Spanish renaissance instruments). Shaped in a manner more closely resembling that of a modern guitar, yet tuned in the manner of a lute, the vihuela was the defining musical instrument of late 15th and 16th century Spain.
The Limits and Pitfalls of “Convivencia” Teofilo Ruiz (Professor of History, UCLA). This lecture, a summation of our study of the great city of Toledo, examines critically the historiographical debate about convivencia, the supposedly peaceful interaction of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in medieval Toledo and Spain. By tracing the historical roots for this concept and its development over time, Professor Ruiz seeks to provide a new assessment of what the term meant for those different religions co-existing in medieval Toledo and Iberia, and what the presence or absence of real convivencia tells us about medieval Spain and about our own conflicted experiences of toleration and intolerance in the modern world. While most Toledan and medieval Castilian art shows a high degree of what Jerrilynn Dodds has defined as hybridity, Professor Ruiz examines, though a brief look at some specific cultural markers, how that hybridity worked at the level of everyday life.
Panel Discussion with all presenters and written questions from the audience.
Presenters
Fred Astren, Professor and Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies and member of the Faculty in Middle East and Islamic Studies at San Francisco State University, received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, where he also earned a master’s degree in Arabic. His bachelor’s is in Medieval History from the University of Minnesota. Among Professor Astren’s publications are: Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (2004); Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Communication, and Interaction (Editor, with B. H. Hary and J. L. Hayes), Festschrift for William M. Brinner (2000); and The Jewish Printed Book in India: Imprints of the Blumenthal Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The Judah L. Magnes Museum (1992). Areas of research include minority/sectarian history history in the Mediterranean Middle Ages, with special focus on Jewish history under Islam, Islamization, Jewish-Muslim relations, and the Karaite Jewish sect. Having recently published a study on Jews in the early medieval Muslim conquests of the Near East and Spain, he is currently writing a book on Jews in the Mediterranean of the early Middle Ages.
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Shira Kammen received her music degree from UC Berkeley and studied vielle with early music specialist Margriet Tindemans. Shira has performed with Alcatraz, Project Ars Nova, Medieval Strings, Sequentia, Hesperion XX, Boston Camerata, Balkan group Kitka, and the Oregon, California and SF Shakespeare Festivals; with singer/storyteller John Fleagle, Fortune’s Wheel, Ephemeros, Panacea, storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball, sopranos Anne Azema, Susan Rode Morris, Margriet Tindemans, and in theatrical and dance productions. She founded Class V Music, an ensemble performing on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue and Klamath Rivers. She has played on television and movie soundtracks, including ‘O’, a modern high school-setting of Othello. Her original music can be heard in a film about fans of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira has played is in the Jerusalem Zoo elephant pit.
Dryden G. Liddle is a recently qualified PhD in history (Open University, UK),with an MA in Economics from Cambridge University, followed by a long career in diplomacy (the UK FO) and banking. His PhD thesis was on Charles V’s financial secretary, 1520-1547, covering issues on the finance of the Habsburg wars and the emergence of the fiscal state, largely by taxing the Castilian towns and not through the silver inflow from the Americas as is often thought. The thesis also covers the diplomatic and personal correspondence of artists, popes, ambassadors, and of course Charles V on issues raised by Luther, the Turk, Algerian piracy, and the wars against France in Italy. With the resulting imperial overstretch there is a clear parable with today, including the role of complex financial instruments, liquidity and subsequent solvency issues.
Deborah Loft is Art History Professor at College of Marin, with a BA from Oberlin College and MA from University of Pennsylvania. She has also worked on the curatorial staff at Fine Arts Museum San Francisco and has lectured at Bay Area museums, including the Getting to Know Modern Artseries at SFMOMA. In recent years, her research has focused on the artistic interactions of a variety of European cultures. Her wide-ranging travels have included significant time in Spain, including Toledo. She has paid particular attention to the ways in which the Islamic architectural vocabulary became integrated into the Christian buildings of northern Europe. She is currently working on a book on the meanings of interlace designs, and their significance as an indicator of intercultural contact.
Peter Maund, a native of San Francisco, studied percussion at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; tabla with Swapan Chauduri at the Ali Akbar College of Music; and music, folklore, and ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley (AB, MA). As a PhD candidate at Berkeley, he specialized in the music of north India. He specializes in hand percussion from the Middle East and North Africa. He has performed and recorded with various early music, contemporary music, and world music ensembles throughout North American, the UK, and Europe, including Chanticleer, Ensemble Project Ars Nova, Paul Hillier, Quaternaria, and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He has toured with Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XX in a program of medieval Spanish music, and performs and records regularly as a member of Ensemble Alcatraz, Davka and Alasdair Fraser’s Skyedance. He has played on film and television soundtracks and has appeared on dozens of recordings. He also enjoys teaching and presenting lectures, workshops and classes.
Kerrin Meis received her master’s degree in art history from UC Berkeley. She lectured at San Francisco State University for many years and taught European Art classes in the Emeritus program at the College of Marin, where she received a Most Valuable Teacher Award. Her focus is on the interaction among artists of different cultures made visible in the recurrence of certain symbols and motifs in architecture, painting and sculpture. She has recently taught courses in Spanish Art and Culture at Elderhostel and at the OLLI program at Dominican University of California and has led travel/study programs in Europe.
David Morris (violoncello) received his BA (Magna cum laude) and MA in Music from UC Berkeley and was the recipient of the University’s Eisner Prize for excellence in the performing arts. He has performed with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and been a guest of the Los Angeles and Portland Baroque Orchestras and the Mark Morris Dance Company. He is a member of Musica Pacifica and is the musical director of the Bay Area baroque opera collective Teatro Bacchino. He is the Dean of Students at the Crowden School in Berkeley, and has conducted the Crowden School Orchestra on festival tours through the United Kingdom and Europe. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Dorian, New Albion and New World.
Susan Rode Morris is a singer of unusual versatility whose accomplishments encompass a wide range of repertoire and musical styles. A native of the SF Bay Area, she has received much critical acclaim for her expressiveness and naturalness in singing, as well as her communicative presence. She is a founding member of Ensemble Alcatraz and has sung with many ensembles including Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Sequentia Koln, Sex Chordae Consort of Viols, Foolia!, Magnificat!, Women’s Philharmonic and others in North America and Europe. She has premiered numerous works of Bay Area composers, including opera and theatre pieces. Performances include appearances at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City, the Cloisters, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and in such cities as Boston, Seattle, Phoenix, New Orleans, Portland, Pittsburgh, London, Regensberg, Vancouver, and at such universities and colleges as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis, Oberlin College, and Washington State. She has enjoyed collaborations with artists including Shira Kammen, Phebe Craig, Judith Nelson, Alasdair Fraser, Paul Hillier, John Dornenburg, and others. In 1992 she founded a recording company called Donsuemor which has released four compact discs, including songs of Henry Purcell and three recordings of the songs of 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. For many years she has studied voice with the legendary Lilian Loran. A special love is teaching children the joy of singing. She owns a baking company (Donsuemor) which supplies the U.S. with fresh madeleines.
Mary Elizabeth (Betsy) Perry is Research Associate for the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and a Fulbright Senior Specialist. She has published five books and many articles and essays on women’s history and marginality in early modern Spain. Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville (http://libro.uca.edu/perry/seville.htm) and Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, won the Sierra Prize; Gender and Disorder has been translated and published in Spain as Ni espada rota, ni mujer que trota. A specialist in marginal people in 16th and 7th-century Spain, her most recent book is on Spanish Moriscos (baptized Muslims), exploring in particular the roles of women and children: The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2005; paperback, 2007; Spanish edition, U. of Granada Press, forthcoming). Peter O’Malley Pierson is Lee & Seymour Graff Professor of History Emeritus, Santa Clara University, where he taught for thirty-four years. He grew up in Southern California, and after two years at Denison University, he completed his undergraduate work at UCLA. Following four years active duty as a US Naval Reserve officer, he returned to UCLA to earn his PhD. Both a Fulbright Fellow to Spain and lately a visiting scholar at Stanford, he has written Philip II of Spain, Commander of the Armada and History of Spain, as well as many articles. He regards it his good fortune to have had to teach the whole of Western Civilization. He has a great interest in maritime and military history, travel, the fine arts, and locally, the opera; he serves on the Advisory Council of Humanities West. He also paints as a pastime.
Teofilo F. Ruiz, Professor of History, UCLA, was a student of Joseph R. Strayer, Teo received his PhD from Princeton in 1974 and has taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center, University of Michigan, Ecole des hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Princeton–as 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching–before coming to UCLA in July 1998. A scholar of the social and cultural (popular culture) of late medieval and early modern Castile, Teo Ruiz’s selected publications include Spain, 1300-1469. Centuries of Crises (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2007); Medieval Europe and the World (with Robin Winks) (Oxford, 2005); From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150-1350 (Princeton University Press, 2004); Spanish Society, 1400-1600 (Longman, 2001); Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1994); The City and the Realm: Burgos and Castile in the Late Middle Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1992); Co-author, Burgos en la Edad Media (Valladolid, 1984) ; Sociedad y poder real en Castilla (Barcelona, 1981); Co-editor of Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton, 1976).
Richard Savino (Doctorate, SUNY) lectures at SF Conservatory of Music, directs the ensemble El Mundo, and is Professor of Music at CSU Sacramento. His instructors included Andres Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, Albert Fuller and Jerry Willard. Recordings include guitar music of Johann Kaspar Mertz; virtuoso sonatas by Paganini and Giuliani; sonatas for flute and guitar; 18th century guitar music from Mexico by Santiago de Murcia (1998);Venice Before Vivaldi, a Portrait of Giovanni Legrenzi and Villancicos y Cantadas; music by Barabara Strozzi, Biagio Marini and Giovanni Buonamente; the Boccherini Guitar Symphonia and Op. 30 Concerto for Guitar by Mauro Giuliani; The Essential Giuliani Vol. 1; Music Fit for a King;and Baroque Guitar Sonatas (1696) of Ludovico Roncallii (2006-07). He received a Diapason d’Or from Compact (Paris) and a 10 du Rèpertoire (Paris). He is a principal performer with the Houston Grand Opera, New York Collegium, Portland Baroque Orchestra, SF Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, San Diego Opera, Opera Colorado, Dallas Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. From 1986-98 he directed the CSU Summer Arts Guitar and Lute Institute, and he has been Visiting Artistic Director of Aston Magna Academy and Music Festival at Rutgers.
Venice: Queen of the Adriatic
October 22–23, 2010
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Venice, poised regally on the Adriatic coast, dominated the Eastern Mediterranean beginning in the twelfth century. Her extensive trade network linked Europe to Byzantium, the Moslem world, and even the distant Asian civilizations explored by Marco Polo. With a unique political system, commercial and technical prowess, and tolerant cultural environment, Venice became the most prosperous city in Europe, and a showcase of magnificent art, architecture, music, and fashion. Although eventually overshadowed as a cultural and economic power by emerging nation-states of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice followed its own unusual path to lasting material and cultural success.
In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco and the Consul General of Italy; Sponsored by Bank of the West; Stanford University; and UC Berkeley.
Friday, October 22, 2010, 8:00 to 10:15 pm
Introduction to the Program Patricia Lundberg (Humanities West) and Hon. Fabrizio Marcelli, Consul General of Italy
The Allure of Venice: Civic Myth and Social Reality. Joanne M. Ferraro (Professor and Chair of History, San Diego State University).
What gave Venice its alluring reputation as ‘The Most Serene Republic?’ Myths like this one fostered civic pride and constructed civic identity, inspiring an elaborate ceremonial symbolism and iconography to represent the floating city. Public space was decorated with icons of Justice and Liberty, while the votive churches of the Redentore and Santa Maria della Salute stood as symbols of pious devotion for staged processions. The pageantry, however, did not mask the hardships of poverty, prostitution, or disease. Social historian Joanne Ferraro explores the civic energies that sustained Venice’s ideal public and sacred symbolism. The city housed courtesans, heretics, sorcerers, and fake saints but also a community of pious donors that built confraternities, hospitals, orphanages, and homes for women whose virtue was endangered.
Performance
Introduced by Clifford (Kip) Cranna, Director of Music Administration, SF Opera
The music of Renaissance Venice expresses the excitement and novelty of that great city. This performance presents the more intimate of the Venetian musical styles—love songs, carnival songs, street seller’s songs, as well as more formal celebratory compositions by some of the Renaissance master composers, are performed by Allison Zelles Lloyd (soprano); David Morris, (viola da gamba, gittern and voice); Gilbert Martinez (harpsichord); Shira Kammen (violin and voice); with Herb Myers.
Venecie mundi splendor
Johannes Ciconia (c.1370–1412)
L’amor donna ch’io te porto
Giacomo Fogliano (1458–1548)
Ancor che col partire
Cipriano da Rore (c. 1515–1565)
Divisions on Ancor che col partire from Il vero modo di diminuir (Venice, 1584)
Girolamo dalla Casa (d. 1601)
Musica dulci sono
Cipriano da Rore
Three settings of Fortuna d’un gran tempo from The Odhecaton published by Ottaviano Petrucci (Venice, 1501)
Anonymous
Toccata
Giovanni Picchi (ca. 1571–1643)
Ballo alla Polacha
Giovanni Picchi
La Romanesca
Biagio Marini (1594–1663)
Si dolce tormento
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643)
Dal lecto mi levava
Michele Pesenti (c. 1470–1524)
Saturday, October 23, 2010, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm
Moderator, Paula Findlen (Professor and Chair, History; Co-Director, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Co-Director, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program; Stanford University)
Regnum aquosum: Space and Society in Medieval Venice Maureen C. Miller (History, UC Berkeley) This broad introduction narrates the emergence and early development of Venice, giving particular attention to the impact of environmental factors. It traces the gradual fusion of island parishes into a city and highlights the distinctive features of Venice’s urban fabric. The lagoon’s role in shaping Venetian economic practices and mentalities is also assessed: did an economy based on fish, salt, and shipping yield a more harmonious social and political order?
From Mosaic to Melting Pot in the Venetian Empire Sally McKee(History, UC Davis) The city of Venice reflected the preeminent role it played in the conquest and economy of markets around the Mediterranean Sea. Venetian merchants and colonial settlers changed the landscape of the cities and territories they dominated. The Lion of St. Mark appeared on public buildings, fortresses, and warehouses in Constantinople, Tyre, Crete, the Aegean Islands, and Cyprus, while monumental trophies displayed in Venice reminded inhabitants of their city’s economic power. But Venetians bore the stamp of empire not just in their clothing, food, art, and language. Venice’sstato da mar promoted as well an influx into Venice of people — slaves, wealthy brides, artisans, and sailors — from all over the eastern Mediterranean. Uniquely multicultural in its time, Venice embodied the benefits and contradictions of foreign domination.
Lunch Break
Venetian Musical Instruments Herb Myers demonstrates Antique Venetian Musical Instruments. Venice is famous for its many significant contributions to the world of music in the 16th and 17th centuries, both as a center of music publishing and as a widely imitated leader in compositional styles. Not the least of its contributions was in the production of musical instruments, particularly woodwinds, string keyboards (virginals and harpsichords), and bowed strings. Herb Myers demonstrates copies and shows images of instruments by Venetian builders of the Renaissance and early Baroque—instruments clearly designed to appeal to the eye as well as the ear.
Performance
Sonata in sol maggiore per violoncello e basso continuo
Benedetto Marcello (1687–1739)
Toccata seconda per tiorba sola
Johannes H. Kapsperger (c. 1580–1651)
Sonata in sol minore per violoncello e basso continuo
Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)
Sonata III per violoncello e basso continuo
Giovanni Benedetto Platti (1697–1763)
Architecture and Urbanism Between East and West: The Piazza San Marco of Venice in Context Max Grossman (Art History, University of Texas El Paso) Long admired as one of the most beautiful and best preserved public squares in Europe, the Piazza San Marco of Venice was for centuries the civic, religious and commercial epicenter of the Republic. The surrounding monumental edifices, including the Basilica of San Marco, Palazzo Ducale, Zecca, Campanile and Procuratie, bear witness to the commercial successes of the great Venetian fleets and their extensive trade with the city’s colonial empire. Moreover, they project the myth of the foundation of Venice by the ancient Romans while declaring the city’s status as the principle gateway into Western Europe for Byzantine and Islamic culture.
Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Venezia Serenissima Concert at SF Conservatory of Music. Alessandro Palmeri (Bassetto Cimapane), SF Conservatory of Music Faculty Richard Savino (lute), Corey Jamason (harpsichord), and Elisabeth Reed (cello).
Presenters
Luciano Chessa teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory. He received his PhD in musicology from University of California Davis. Previously, at the Conservatory of Bologna, he earned a DMA in piano and a MA in composition. His areas of research interest include 20th-century music, experimental music and late 14th-century music, and he has been interviewed at the CBS (KPIX/KBHK) television channel as an expert on Italian hip-hop. His scholarly writings can be found in MIT Press’ Leonardo and Musica e Storia, the Journal of the Levi Foundation, Venice. He is currently working on the first English monograph dedicated to Luigi Russolo, to be published by University of California Press. Dr. Chessa is also active as a composer and performer. His scores (including a large work for orchestra and double children choir, and a piano and three turntables duo) are published by RAI TRADE, and many are produced with visual artist Terry Berlier. Since 1999 he has been musical program coordinator for the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco, where he produces concerts of Italian contemporary music.
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.
Joanne M. Ferraro (PhD UCLA), Professor and Chair of History at SDSU, is an historian of Renaissance and early modern Venice. A specialist in the history of marriage and the family, she has published Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650. TheFoundations of Power in the Venetian State(Cambridge, 1993); Marriage Wars in LateRenaissance Venice (Oxford, 2001), which was awarded best book from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian Historical Studies; and Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice. Illicit Sex in the Republic of Venice, 1557-1789 (Johns Hopkins, 2008). Ferraro has received research fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Gladys Krieble Foundation. She is an “International Associate” of Venice’s Ateneo Veneto and serves as a Vice President of the American Friends of the Marciana Library. Ferraro is currently writing a history of Venice for Cambridge University Press.
Moderator, Paula Findlen (Professor and Chair, History; Co-Director, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Co-Director, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program; Stanford University) is “fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society.” Among her many publications are The Italian Renaissance: Essential Readings (Blackwell, 2002); and “Men, Moments and Machines” special on the History Channel: “Galileo and the Sinful Spyglass.”
Max Grossman, Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Texas El Paso (UTEP), formerly taught in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University and at Stanford University (BA, Art History and English, UC Berkeley; MA/PhD, Art History, Columbia University). After seven years of residence in Tuscany, he completed his dissertation on the civic architecture, urbanism and iconography of the Sienese Republic in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. He has presented papers at academic conferences around the United States, including at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, and chaired a session entitled “The Italian Civic Palace in the Age of the City-Republics” at the 1st International Meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Guimarães, Portugal in 2010. He is currently preparing the main arguments of his doctoral thesis, the first synthetic treatment of the total architectural production of an Italian city-state, for submission. His research is focused on the political iconography of the Sienese commune, as manifested in painting, sculpture, architecture, coinage, seals and manuscripts. In addition, he is studying the development of the Italian civic palace, from its origins in the twelfth century through its final transformations in the Quattrocento, challenging and revising accepted paradigms while forming a new critical apparatus for interpreting the architecture and urbanism of medieval and Renaissance city-states.
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Shira Kammen received her music degree from UC Berkeley and studied vielle with Margriet Tindemans. Shira has performed with Alcatraz, Project Ars Nova, Medieval Strings, Sequentia, Hesperion XX, Boston Camerata, Balkan group Kitka, and the Oregon, California and SF Shakespeare Festivals; with John Fleagle, Fortune’s Wheel, Ephemeros, Panacea, Patrick Ball, Anne Azema, Susan Rode Morris, Margriet Tindemans, and in theatrical and dance productions. She founded Class V Music, an ensemble performing on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue and Klamath Rivers. She has played on soundtracks, including ‘O’, a modern high school-setting of Othello. Her original music can be heard in a film about fans of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira played is the Jerusalem Zoo elephant pit.
Gilbert Martinez (harpsichord) is the Artistic Director of MusicSources, the Bay Area’s center for early music. He studied harpsichord at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Laurette Golberg, who was the founder of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and MusicSources. Subsequently he was invited to Italy to study with Alan Curtis. In addition to revitalizing MusicSources’ concerts and programs, he has had the pleasure of appearing with many soloist and ensembles, including Anne Akiko Meyers, The New Century Chamber Orchestra, Musica Angelica, Les Idees Heureses of Montreal, to name only a few. For more of his recent activity, see www.musicsouces.org.
David Morris (violoncello) received his BA (Magna cum laude) and MA in Music from UC Berkeley and was the recipient of the University’s Eisner Prize for excellence in the performing arts. He has performed with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and been a guest of the Los Angeles and Portland Baroque Orchestras and the Mark Morris Dance Company. He is a member of Musica Pacifica and is the musical director of the Bay Area baroque opera collective Teatro Bacchino. He is the Dean of Students at the Crowden School in Berkeley, and has conducted the Crowden School Orchestra on festival tours through the United Kingdom and Europe. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Dorian, New Albion and New World.
Sally McKee (History, UC Davis) crisscrossed North America as an academic before becoming a professor at UC Davis since 1990. Since 1989, she has spent much of her research time in Venice and specializes as a late medieval/early Renaissance historian on the origins of the Adriatic empire. Publications include “Inherited Status and Slavery in Renaissance Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past & Present 182 (February, 2004), 31-53 (awarded the 2004 Berkshire Conference of Women Historian’s Article Prize); Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); “Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete,” Speculum: A Journal of the Medieval Academy of America 70 (January 1995), 27-67; “Women Under Venetian Colonial Rule: Some Observations on their Economic Activities,” Renaissance Quarterly, 51/1 (1998), 34-67; Editor, Wills from Late Medieval Venetian Crete (1312 – 1420), 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997).
Maureen C. Miller is a historian of medieval Europe with a particular interest in Italy. She earned her PhD from Harvard University, where she studied with the distinguished social and economic historian, David Herlihy. Her first book, The Formation of a a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950-1150 (Cornell University Press, 1993), won the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea prize for the best book on Catholic history published that year. Her second book, The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Cornell University Press, 2000), was awarded the 2001 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best book in Italian history. After teaching at Hamilton College and George Mason University, she joined the history department at UC Berkeley. She is currently working on a book on clerical clothing in Rome, 800-1300.
Herb Myers (DMA, Stanford) is Lecturer of Renaissance Winds at Stanford University. He is also Curator, Harry R. Lange Historical Collection of Musical Instruments and Bows, and a Member of The Whole Noyse. Formerly he was a member of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua. He has recorded for Columbia, Orion, Intrada, and Musical Heritage Society. His articles and reviews have appeared in Early Music, The American Recorder, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, The Galpin Society Journal and Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America;EMA Performance Guides.
Alessandro Palmeri studied cello at the Conservatory of Music of Palermo. He has performed as 1° cello and soloist in Europe, Russia, Canada, US, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Japan for prestigious musical institutions- International Festival of Contemporary Music of Warsaw, International Festival of Bacau, Amici della Musica (Italy), Nuova Consonanza, Teatro Massimo of Palermo, Scarlatti Festival, Teatro Comunale of Bologna, Romanian Radiotelevisione, Blumental Festival of Tel Aviv, CIDIM – New Careers of Rome, International Festival of San Pietroburgo, New York University, Bologna Festival, Bimhuis of Amsterdam, l’University Navarro of Pamplona, Auditorio Nacional de Madrid, Innsbruck Festival, Teatre des Champs Elysees, Vancouver Festiva. He recorded for Tactus, Florentia Musicae, Stradivarius, Symphonia, Amadeus, Opus 111, Naive, ZigZag, Hyperion. He has approached the baroque repertory with original instruments, attending the course of the Fondazione Cini of Venice and collaborating with ensembles of ancient music – “Il Ruggiero”, “Auser musici”, “Antonio Il Verso”, “L’Astrée”, “Cantica Simphonia”, “La Venexiana”, “Academia Montis Regalis”, collaborating with Savall, Kuiyken, Coin, De Marchi. He is member of Imaginarium by Enrico Onofri to perform baroque Italian repertoire. He founded the chamber ensemble Il Ricercar Continuo to perform music for bass and continuo’s instrument. He has taught baroque cello at the international courses of ancient music and has been invited to give master classes throughout Italy and Europe. He plays a rare Italian cello, almost a ‘bassetto’ or a bass violin, by Simone Cimapane (Rome 1685). A few years ago Palmeri found and restored this rare violoncello. The Bassetto Cimapane owes its uniqueness to the fact that it was played in the Arcangelo Corelli Orchestra in Rome. For its features and historical relevance, it belongs in the Italian musical heritage. It is the only instrument of its kind known to be in existence. Sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute, Alessandro Palmeri joins Humanities West for a special performance on the Cimapane Bassetto of music by Italian authors of the 17th century who wrote the earliest compositions for cello.
Richard Savino (Doctorate, SUNY) lectures at SF Conservatory of Music, directs ensemble El Mundo, and is Professor of Music at CSU. His instructors included Andres Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, Albert Fuller and Jerry Willard. Recordings include guitar music of Johann Kaspar Mertz; sonatas by Paganini and Giuliani; 18th century guitar music from Mexico by Santiago de Murcia;Venice Before Vivaldi; music by Barabara Strozzi, Biagio Marini and Giovanni Buonamente; the Boccherini Guitar Symphonia and Op. 30 Concerto for Guitar by Mauro Giuliani; Essential Giuliani Vol. 1; Music Fit for a King; andBaroque Guitar Sonatas of Ludovico Roncallii (2006-07). He received aDiapason d’Or from Compact (Paris) and a 10 du Rèpertoire (Paris). He is a principal performer New York Collegium; Portland Baroque Orchestra; SF Symphony; and with the Operas of Houston, Santa Fe, San Diego, Colorado, Dallas, and Glimmerglass Opera. He has been Visiting Artistic Director of Aston Magna Academy and Music Festival at Rutgers.
Allison Zelles Lloyd has toured and recorded, in the US and Europe with Bimbetta [d’Note label], the Medieval ensemble Altramar [Dorian Discovery], Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices [Harmonia Mundi] and minimalist, Steve Reich [Nonesuch]. She has performed locally with the chamber ensemble, American Baroque, and the chorus of the American Bach Soloists as well as AVE. She holds a Masters of Music degree from the Early Music Institute of Indiana University. She utilizes her vocal, keyboard, percussion, recorder and medieval harp skills in the music education of young children and their parents as a registered Music Together® teacher and as an Orff Schulwerk certified music educator in the Mt. Diablo school district.
The Florence of the Medici: Commerce, Power, and Art in Renaissance Italy
April 30 – May 1, 2010
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Out of a small but fiercely competitive city of some 60,000 inhabitants there erupted, between the 14th and 17th centuries, a torrent of artistic and intellectual creativity that transformed western culture. The wealth of the city, and especially of its rulers, the Medici, whose patronage and influence embraced much of Italy and beyond, made possible an outburst of artistic and intellectual innovations that had consequences throughout Europe. Home to Dante, Toscanelli (the geographer who inspired Columbus), Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo, Florence in these years was at the cutting edge of changes that eventually were to shape the modern world.
Humanities West Board Fellow Dimitrios Latsis has archived selected program materials, including audio of lectures and performances if available, at the non-profit Internet Archive here.
Moderator: Theodore Rabb, PhD (History), Emeritus, Princeton University
Friday, April 30, 2010
8:15 pm until 10:15 pm
“For the glory of God and the honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself:” Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of Art Keynote Address. Dale Kent (History, UC Riverside). Cosimo de’ Medici achieved power in his lifetime and fame beyond it through his outstanding skills in business and politics—civic, Italian, and international. But he captured the imagination of his contemporaries and has remained an almost legendary figure of history largely because he devoted much of his wealth to patronage of the greatest artists of the early Renaissance. This lecture will examine the image that Cosimo’s commissions expressed; his dedication to family, friends and city, his concern for salvation after death, and his pleasure in the cultivated enjoyment of this life.
Public Sculpture in the Florence of the Medici Loren Partridge (Art History, UC Berkeley). The extraordinary marble and bronze freestanding figures embellishing the public spaces of Florence constitute some of the greatest glories of Renaissance art. Bold and inventive, thanks to the intense pressure of public scrutiny and artistic rivalry, these monumental works represent some of the most significant aesthetic achievements within Medicean Florence. They register and construct the city’s shifting political discourse across two centuries. Works discussed include Donatello’s gilt bronze St. Louis of Toulouse (1422-25), Verrocchio’s bronze Christ and Doubting Thomas (1467-83), Michelangelo’s marble David (1501-04), Bandindelli’s marble Hercules and Cacus (1534), Cellini’s bronze Perseus Beheading Medusa (1554), Danti’s marble Cosimo I as Augustus (1572-73), and Giambologna’s Equestrian Monument to Cosimo I (1594).
Saturday, May 1, 2010
10:00 am until 12 noon & 1:30 to 4:00 pm
Creating the Uffizi: The Medici and Their Museum Paula Findlen (History, Stanford University). The Uffizi gallery is one of the most enduring legacies of the Medici. This lecture traces the multiple transformations of the Medici collections, from the origins under Cosimo il Vecchio to the creation of the gallery in the sixteenth century and its reinvention as a public museum in the eighteenth century. What was the meaning of this collection for the Medici? How did it become one of the most famous and visited museums in the world?
The Birth of a New Politics Theodore Rabb (History, Princeton University). Even as Florence alternated between the rule of the Medici and a more broadly-based republican structure, two of her citizens were rethinking the very nature of politics and political destiny. Machiavelli and Guicciardini were neighbors; both served the city’s government; and both were experienced diplomats. Both, too, were students of history. But Guicciardini’s conclusions were deeply pessimistic. Machiavelli, on the other hand, fashioned a way of thinking about political life that offered scope for human action, and his ideas were to influence thought and behavior for generations.
Musical Performance. The rich and florid secular music of the courts of the Italian trecento. Susan Rode Morris(soprano), Michelle Levy and Shira Kammen (vielles and medieval harp), present a selection of compositions from this era of astonishing and gorgeous musical styles. The songs concern love and politics, and the instrumental dances represent a spicy and highly ornamented repertoire.
Michelangelo and the Medici: A Forced Relationship? Morten Steen Hansen (Art History, Stanford University). At the funeral of Michelangelo (1475-1564) in Florence, orchestrated by the newly founded Accademia del Disegno under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I, Michelangelo was praised as the Florentine genius who had perfected Tuscan style. Nurtured in the sculpture garden of Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo had made the school of Florence superior to any other artistic school, and his art was taken to prove Tuscan cultural hegemony inseparable from the Medici family. The same Michelangelo had, however, carved a Brutus in celebration of the assassination of Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence. This lecture explores the conflicted relationship between artist and the Florentine family.
Panel Discussion with all Presenters
Presenters
Clifford (Kip) Cranna (PhD, Musicology, Stanford) is Director of Musical Administration at San Francisco 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. He was Il Cenacolo’s 2006 “Man of the Year.” In 2008 he was awarded the SF Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor.
Paula Findlen is Professor and Chair of History; Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Co-Director of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program; all at Stanford. Her interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. She is “fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society.” Some publications include “Historical Thought in the Renaissance,” in Companion to Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Blackwell, 2002); “Building the House of Knowledge: The Structures of Thought in Late Renaissance Europe,” in Tore Frangsmyr, ed., The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning since the Renaissance(Berkeley, 2001); (ed.) The Italian Renaissance: Essential Readings(Blackwell, 2002). “Men, Moments and Machines” special on the History Channel: “Galileo and the Sinful Spyglass.”
Morten Steen Hansen is Assistant Professor Art History, Stanford University (PhD Johns Hopkins University). While his research primarily concerns 16th century Italy he teaches courses within a broad range of the visual culture of Europe from the 15th through the 17th century. He has held post-doctoral fellowships from the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, and the Carlsberg Foundation. His pre-doctoral work was supported by grants from Fulbright Foundation, Kress Foundation, Fondazione Lemmermann, and the Danish Academy in Rome. His forthcoming book examines the imitation of Michelangelo in Italian Mannerism and issues of artistic latecoming in light of that artist’s increasingly controversial status during his lifetime. Hansen’s publications on the Cinquecento consider church patronage as self-representations by ethnic minorities, artifice used to defend cult images against protestant assumptions, and pictorial imitation in the service of artistic self-fashioning. In Italian archives he has found and published contracts and other unknown documents related to church patronage in the Papal States.
Andrea Husby began her studies at the University of San Francisco where she received a BA and MA in English Literature. While living in Paris and The Hague, she began her study of the Fine Arts. Dr. Husby received a MA in Art History from Hunter College in New York City in 1992 and a PhD in Art History from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York in 2003. Since returning to California, she has taught Art History at Pacific Union College and Santa Rosa Junior College, and the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring the worlds of early and traditional music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, and Medieval Strings, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, the Boston Camerata, the Balkan group Kitka, the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to performance on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue and Klamath Rivers.
Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller John Fleagle for fifteen years, and performs now with several new groups: a medieval ensemble, Fortune’s Wheel: a new music group, Ephemeros; an eclectic ethnic band, Panacea; as well as frequent collaborations with performers such as storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball, sopranos Anne Azema, Susan Rode Morris, medieval music expert Margriet Tindemans, and in many theatrical and dance productions. She has played on several television and movie soundtracks, including ‘O’, a modern high school-setting of Othello. Some of her original music can be heard in an independent film about fans of the work of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira has played is in the elephant pit of the Jerusalem Zoo. Shira Kammen grew up in the SF Bay Area. After receiving her music degree from UC Berkeley, Shira studied vielle with Margriet Tindemans, a specialist in early music.
Dale V. Kent, Professor of History, UC, Riverside, has been a Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, National Humanities Center of the United States, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Her research, concerned with patronage in all its senses – personal, political, and artistic- with a particular focus on the fifteenth-century Medici family of Florence, combines history and art history. Her publications include The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence 1426-1434, Oxford, 1978; Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre, Yale University Press, 2000; Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, Harvard University Press, 2009. She was chief consultant for the recent PBS special on the Medici, and is working on a new book, Fathers and Friends: Patronage and Patriarchy in early Medicean Florence, showing how society, politics and culture were linked, structurally and ideologically, through patronage practices and patriarchal ideals.
Michelle Levy studied classical viola with Consuelo Sherba and David Rubenstein as well as Old Timey fiddle/banjo with Professor Jeff Titon at Brown University. After receiving a scholarship to Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School, she fell in love with the spontaneity of folk music and began a career focused on accompanying vocalists, improvising, and performing ancient music from Europe, Scandinavia & the Middle East. She is continuing her musical studies on medieval vielle with Shira Kammen and performs throughout the country with an eclectic variety of ensembles. Most recently she co-created an ecologically-minded musician community-house in Berkeley, CA.
Susan Rode Morris is a singer of unusual versatility whose accomplishments encompass a wide range of repertoire and musical styles. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has received much critical acclaim for her expressiveness and naturalness in singing, as well as her communicative presence. She is a founding member of Ensemble Alcatraz and has sung with many ensembles including Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Sequentia Koln, Sex Chordae Consort of Viols, Foolia!, Magnificat!, Women’s Philharmonic and others in North America and Europe. She has premiered numerous works of Bay Area composers, including opera and theatre pieces. Performances include appearances at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C, Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City, the Cloisters, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and in such cities as Boston, Seattle, Phoenix, New Orleans, Portland, Pittsburgh, London, Regensberg, Vancouver, and at such universities and colleges as Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Davis, Oberlin College, and Washington State. She has enjoyed collaborations with artists including Shira Kammen, Phebe Craig, Judith Nelson, Alasdair Fraser, Paul Hillier, John Dornenburg, and others. In 1992 she founded a recording company called Donsuemor which has released four compact discs, including songs of Henry Purcell and three recordings of the songs of 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. For many years she has studied voice with the legendary Lilian Loran. A special love is teaching children the joy of singing. She owns a baking company (Donsuemor) which supplies the U.S. with fresh madeleines. She divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sierra Foothills.
Loren Partridge is Professor of the Graduate School in History of Art, UC Berkeley. He has taught Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture at UC Berkeley for over forty years as well as chaired intermittently the History of Art Department for thirteen years and the Art Practice Department for five years. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, Kress Foundation, Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, Fulbright Program, Guggenheim foundation, and the Getty Foundation. Aside from numerous articles and reviews in professional journals, his major publications include: A Renaissance Likeness: Art and Culture in Raphael’s “Julius II”, co-authored with Randolph Starn (Berkeley: UC Press,1980); Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy 1300-1600, co-authored with Randolph Starn (Berkeley: UC Press, 1992); Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome (NY: Braziller, 1996) The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400-1600 (NY: Abrams, 1996); Michelangelo, Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration, with contributions by Fabrizio Mancinelli and Gianluigi Colalucci (NY: Abrams, 1997); and most recently Art of Renaissance Florence 1400-1600 (Berkeley: UC Press, 2009). In progress is a monograph on the late sixteenth century Villa Farnese at Caprarola north of Rome.
Theodore Rabb, Emeritus Professor of History, Princeton University (PhD Princeton), is a specialist in Renaissance and Early Modern European History. He has been on the Princeton faculty since 1967, where he has taught a variety of courses in European history both within the department and in the interdisciplinary area of Humanistic Studies. He has been the editor of theJournal of Interdisciplinary History since 1970 and has published and edited a number of books including: Renaissance Lives (1993, paperback 2000);Jacobean Gentleman (1998); The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975); The Last Days of the Renaissance (2006); Enterprise and Empire (1967). He has written dozens of articles and reviews for many publications, including Past & Present, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Times. He has directed Princeton’s Community College Programs since 1984 and has chaired the National Council for History Education and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. He is currently engaged in a long-term study on the response of artists to warfare, from ancient Assyria to Guernica.
Richard Savino’s performances and recordings have been praised by critics throughout the world. In addition to receiving a Diapason d’Or from Compact ( Paris) and a 10 du Rèpertoire (Paris), the latter has also placed his Boccherini recordings in their “Great Discoveries” category which they deem as essential to any classical music collection. He has also recorded the romantic guitar music of Johann Kaspar Mertz (HM) virtuoso sonatas by Paganini and Giuliani with violinist Monica Huggett, and sonatas for flute and guitar with flutist Laurel Zucker. In 1998 Koch International released his recording of an extensive collection of 18th century guitar music from Mexico by Santiago de Murcia(4 Stars: Goldberg) which the Public Radio International program The World featured as its “Global Hit,” and in September 1999 Mr. Savino was the subject of a one hour special on the PRI program Harmonia.
With El Mundo he has recorded Venice Before Vivaldi, a Portrait of Giovanni Legrenzi and Villancicos y Cantadas (sacred music from Spain and Latin America) and with Ensemble Galatea he has recorded the music by Barabara Strozzi(Emanuella Galli, mezzo soprano), Biagio Marini (with Monica Huggett) and Giovanni Buonamente (with Monica Huggett and Bruce Dickey). In recent years Koch released his recording of the first period instrument versions of the Boccherini Guitar Symphonia and the Op. 30 Concerto for Guitar by Mauro Giuliani with Ms. Huggett and the Portland Baroque Orchestra.
His most recent recordings (2006-07) include The Essential Giuliani Vol. 1 (Koch), Music Fit for a King (solo baroque guitar music by Robert De Viseé and Françios Campion) and Baroque Guitar Sonatas (1696) of Ludovico Roncallii (Dorian). As a continuo player and accompanist Mr. Savino has worked with some of the world’s most important performers and is a principal performer with the Houston Grand Opera, New York Collegium, Portland Baroque Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, San Diego Opera, Opera Colorado, Dallas Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. From 1986-98 Mr. Savino directed the CSU Summer Arts Guitar and Lute Institute. Presently he is director of the ensemble El Mundo, and in 1995 and 2005 he was Visiting Artistic Director of the prestigious NEH sponsored Aston Magna Academy and Music Festival at Rutgers University. An avid writer, Mr. Savino has had articles and editions published by Cambridge University Press, Editions Chantarelle and Indiana University Press. He is a lecturer and instructor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a Professor of Music at CSU Sacramento where he has been the only music professor to receive “outstanding and exceptional” and “best” sabbatical awards. Mr. Savino’s instructors have included Andres Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, Albert Fuller and Jerry Willard. He received his Doctorate from SUNY at Stony Brook.
Alexander/Alexandria: The Flowering of Hellenistic Culture
February 5–6, 2010
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Alexander conquered the vast Persian Empire and founded Alexandria before dying in his 33rd year, in 323 BCE. In the aftermath, Greek literature, learning, and art intermingled with Egyptian, Iranian, Babylonian, and Hebrew cultures. Nowhere did this convergence of cultures emerge more dramatically than in Alexandria, which became the royal seat of Hellenistic Egypt. Its Great Library and Museum and its Lighthouse— one of the ancient wonders of the world—became magnets for travelers from the Mediterranean and beyond. Though Alexandria’s original Library was destroyed long ago, another has risen from its ashes, and the luster of Hellenistic Civilization that flourished for three centuries after Alexander still endures.
Moderator: William S. Greenwalt (Professor of Classics, Director of University Honors, Director of Lead Scholars, and Director of Fellowships, Santa Clara University)
Humanities West Board Fellow Dimitrios Latsis has archived selected program materials, including audio of lectures and performances if available, at the non-profit Internet Archive here.
Friday, February 5, 2010 8:00 until 10:15 pm
Introduction: Patricia Lundberg and Moderator William Greenwalt’s Overview of Program Alexander the Great: Agent for Change? Keynote Address Eugene N. Borza (History, Pennsylvania State University). Two things are certain about Alexander the Great. One is that he is among the greatest military commanders of all time. The other is that the eastern Mediterranean and western Asian worlds were transformed because of his passage, resulting in the penetration of Greek culture into previously non-Hellenic parts of the world. To what extent was the introduction of Greek culture into Egypt and the East the result of a deliberate policy of Hellenization? Did Alexander, a pupil of Aristotle who himself had made clear distinctions between Greeks and “barbarians,” have a deliberate policy of introducing Greek culture into the “barbarian” world? How do we go about attempting to answer these questions? And following from this, one must ask to what extent Hellenic culture—whatever its source—actually penetrated deeply into native cultures such as Ptolemaic Egypt during the Hellenistic Era. Picturing Ptolemaic Egypt: The Nile Mosaic from Praeneste Andrew Stewart (Art History, UC Berkeley). The huge and spectacular Nile Mosaic from Praeneste (ancient Palestrina) in Italy, discovered in 1600, transferred to Rome in 1626, returned in 1640, and now heavily restored, remains our best guide not to Ptolemaic Egypt as such, but to Ptolemaic attitudes to Egypt. Labeled in Greek, it faithfully pictures many key elements of Ptolemaic material culture from drinking vessels to temples, and must echo a Ptolemaic painting of the third or second centuries BCE. This lecture examines its threefold image of the country: the Hellenized Delta; the Egyptian chora; and the wilds of Nubia.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
10:00 am until 12 noon & 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Recap of Friday. William Greenwalt, Moderator
The Ancient Library at Alexandria: Facts and Fictions Susan Stephens (Classics, Stanford University). Founded by Alexander in his conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and ruled by a line of his successors, the Ptolemies, Alexandria was the city from which Greeks now ruled over the land of the pharaohs. It was also a city in which Greek and Egyptian cultures must have mixed. The famous Alexandrian library is a case in point. To what extent was it inspired by previous Greek models? Could Egyptian temple libraries have played a role? What was the scribal culture like that enabled the collection and maintenance of so many books? What roles did scholar-poets like Callimachus or Apollonius play in shaping the culture of the early city? What happened to the library? Did the Romans destroy it by accident? The Christians? The Muslims? Or simply time itself?
Jewish Culture in Alexandria: The Hebrew Bible in Greek Erich Gruen (History, UC Berkeley). A wonderful and witty legend has it that Ptolemy II, the Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, summoned the most learned Jewish scholars from Jerusalem to his court to render the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The scholars performed that task with precision, earning the gratitude of the Greek-speaking Jewish community, and Ptolemy added the sacred translation to the shelves of his magnificent library in Alexandria. This lecture employs this tale, however fictitious it may be, as an illuminating window on the place of Jewish culture in the life of Alexandria and on the relationship between Jewish intellectuals and the Hellenistic monarchy in Egypt.
Alexandria, the City of Imagination: Cavafy and the Ptolemies The poetry of C. P. Cavafy set in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Readings and translations by Martha Klironomos (English and Modern Greek Studies, San Francisco State University).
Alexander’s Pictorial Legacy Ada Cohen (Art History, Dartmouth College). Textual and visual sources suggest that Alexander the Great was not just a brutal conqueror but that he also possessed and exhibited a certain human complexity. The impression that he also aspired to the life of the mind contributes to his fame. This lecture addresses various layers of complexity embedded within works of art depicting Alexander or other “model” men of his cultural environment, which often highlight aggression. It also demonstrates the longevity of visual paradigms that became dominant in Alexander’s era and explores aspects of the evolution of Alexander’s image over time.
Synthesis and Panel Discussion with all Presenters and Written Questions from the Audience
Presenters
Eugene N. Borza is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at The Pennsylvania State University, where he served on the faculty from 1964 until his retirement in 1995. He has held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of Washington, Trinity University, and Carleton College, and has been a visiting professor and special research fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has lectured widely on the history and archaeology of ancient Macedonia, and has chaired the Lecture Program Committee of the Archaeological Institute of America, for which he has been an annual lecturer since 1975. From 1984 to 1990 he was President of the Association of Ancient Historians. Among his publications are numerous articles about the history and archaeology of ancient Macedonia, and the history and historiography of Alexander the Great. He is the author of In the Shadow of Olympus. The Emergence of Macedon (Princeton, 1990, 1992),Makedonika: Essays by Eugene N. Borza (Association of Ancient Historians, 1995), and Before Alexander: Constructing Early Macedonia (Association of Ancient Historians, 1999).
Ada Cohen is an Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College, where she teaches courses primarily on ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern Art, as well as theory and method. A native of Greece, she received her BA from Brandeis University and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. She is the author of The Alexander Mosaic: Stories of Victory and Defeat, and co-editor of and contributor to Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy. Her book on Art and Culture in the Era of Alexander the Great: Paradigms of Manhood and their Cultural Traditions is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and a co-edited volume,Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography, is forthcoming from the University Press of New England. Her current project is on beauty and ugliness in ancient Greece.
William S. Greenwalt received his BA, MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. He received the Santa Clara Summer School Excellence in Teaching Award, the Santa Clara University Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence, the Logothetti Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Santa Clara University Brutocao Award for Curricular Innovation, and the Arnold L. & Lois Graves Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005, 2001, 1999, 1995 and 1991 respectively. In addition to being a Professor of Classics, he is also a Professor (by courtesy) in the department of History. He offers a number of courses from an introduction to classical culture to seminars in Greek and Roman History. His publications have focused on the early development of ancient Macedonia, in which area he continues to be active. He also serves as Santa Clara University’s Director of Honors, the Lead Scholars Program, and, the Office of Fellowships. Erich S. Gruen, Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics, UC Berkeley (PhD Harvard) was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, twice a Guggenheim Fellow, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Visiting Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. His awards include Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley, and the James H. Breasted Prize (for The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 1984). Other publications include: Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts, l49-78 BC(l968), The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (l974, 1995), Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (l990, 1996), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992, 1994); Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World (co-ed.) (1993); Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography (co-ed.) (1997); Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998); Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (2002); Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (ed.) (2005).
Andrew G. Jameson holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and a doctorate in history from the Sorbonne (University of Paris), a Master of Science degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston, and a degree in archival management from Radcliffe College. He retired after forty-two years of academic teaching (Byzantine, Near Eastern, African history) and administration at Harvard, where he was Senior Tutor, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Assistant Vice Chancellor.
He is Director Emeritus of Books for Asia of The Asia Foundation and President Emeritus of the Academy of Art San Francisco. He served for many years as consultant to the American Publishing Industry for charitable book projects in Africa and Asia, and he was advisor to the National Libraries of Nigeria and China.
Professor Jameson has lived, taught, and traveled extensively in the Near East and Africa and has led study groups to Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Iran, India, China, and Southeast Asia and continues to lecture and write on African and Asian cultures and on the history of libraries. He is the author of historical works on libraries and the Orthodox Church and monasteries and is researching a book on the history of the Nicene Creed and on the history and lore of the camel.
He is a member of Harvard’s Graduate Council and a trustee of the William Saroyan Foundation. He was visiting professor of history at Bosphorus University of Istanbul and advisor to the library of Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church in Istanbul-Constantinople. He is currently historian of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and was recently elected to the Explorers Club of New York for his dissemination of geographical knowledge and for having climbed Mounts Kilimanjaro and Cameroon and trekked across the Sahara with the Tuareg. He is also Destination Lecturer for the Seaborn and SilverSea Cruise Lines and has returned to school to pursue a degree in theology.
A World War II veteran of the Infantry, he earned a Bronze Star with Cluster and a Purple Heart with Cluster for his participation on the Battle of the Bulge.
Martha Klironomos, Professor of English and Modern Greek Studies, is the Director of the Center for Modern Greek Studies, the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair, at San Francisco State University where she has been teaching courses in Modern Greek language and literature as well as Comparative and English literature courses since 1996. She previously held an appointment as Assistant Professor in Modern Greek literature at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, from 1994-1996 and was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Seferis Chair at Harvard University from 1993-1994. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University. Her research areas include the poetry of the two Nobel Prize-winning authors George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, British and American 20th century travel writing to Greece and contemporary Greek American literature. She is working on a book-length study on memory and historicism in the work of George Seferis and his generation of writers. Currently, she is the Associate Editor of the Arts and Humanities of theJournal of Modern Greek Studies, a refereed interdisciplinary journal published by Johns Hopkins Press. She is also serving as Secretary of the Modern Greek Studies Association, the largest professional organization of faculty, graduate students and researchers in Modern Greek Studies in the U.S. and Canada.
Susan Stephens is Professor of Classics, Stanford University (PhD Stanford). Stephens’ current research is on the political and social dimensions of Hellenistic literature. Publications include editions of literary and documentary papyri belonging to the Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy. 45) and the Yale (P. Yale II) collections. Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments (with Jack Winkler, 1995); Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria(2003); Classics and National Cultures (With Phiroze Vasunia) will appear this year.
Andrew Stewart, Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies and Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology at UC Berkeley, directed the UC Berkeley excavation team at Tel Dor, Israel, from 1986 through 2006, and currently chairs UC Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. He specializes in ancient Greek art and archaeology, the Greeks in the East both before and after Alexander the Great, and the Renaissance and later reception of Greek and Roman sculpture. His awards include UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award; Guggenheim, Getty, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships; and the Wittenborn and Association of American Publishers awards for hisGreek Sculpture: An Exploration (1990). His other publications includeSkopas of Paros (1977); Attika: Studies in Athenian Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (1979); Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (1993); Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece (1997); Attalos, Athens, and the Akropolis: The Pergamene “Little Barbarians” and their Roman and Renaissance Legacy (2004); and Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art (2008).
Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler: Redefining Our Place in the Universe
October 2–3, 2009
Herbst Theatre, San Francisco
Commemorating the 400th anniversary of modern astronomy and Galileo’s first use of the telescope in 1609.
For centuries, religious belief and philosophical reasoning had placed man and his earthly home at the center of the universe. Changing that deep-seated and psychologically compelling conviction took courage, persistence, and a dedication to new methods of scientific observation and measurement on the part of three provincial scholars from Toruń in Poland, Pisa in Italy, and Weil der Stadt in Germany. It also took more than 150 years of controversy and confrontation spanning most of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Copernicus’ life work first published as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 to Newton’s Principia in 1687. Those years of controversy succeeded beyond belief, leading to today’s astronomical shifts in understanding an expanding universe that may contain millions of life-supporting planets in our galaxy alone.
Moderator: Alexander Zwissler Executive Director, Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
Humanities West Board Fellow Dimitrios Latsis has archived selected program materials, including audio of lectures and performances if available, at the non-profit Internet Archive here.
Friday, October 2, 2009
8:00 pm until 10:15 pm
Introduction: 25th Anniversary Season (Patricia Lundberg) and Moderator Alexander Zwissler’s Overview of the Program
Keynote Address:The Copernican Revolution. Roger Hahn (History, UC Berkeley).
Nothing was so bizarre and more contradictory to evidence in 16th century Christian Europe than removing man and the earth from its central position in the cosmos. Yet this was the revolution in thought that Copernicus initiated. How it happened and why it took another century and a half to be fully absorbed in Newton’s era is the amazing story to be told. The twists and turns will take us from Copernicus’ Poland to an island observatory in the Danish Sound where Tycho Brahe compiled data Kepler tested out to establish the elliptical orbits of planets; to Northern Italy where Galileo created a furor with Catholic authorities; and to Cambridge University where the reclusive Newton set forth the forces that held the new solar system together.
The Music of the Spheres. Kip Cranna (San Francisco Opera) discusses why star-gazers from Pythagoras to Kepler believed that mathematical laws producing musical harmony on earth also determine the movements of heavenly bodies, creating a universe ordered by a kind of celestial harmony.
The Star Dances. Kathryn Roszak’s Danse Lumiere. Introduced by Bethany Cobb (UC Berkeley). An original choreography inspired by Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres.” The dances take inspiration from the latest star/planet mapping by astronomers at UC Berkeley. Music includes Holst’s “The Planets” for two pianos.
Performance
Redefining Our Place in the Universe. The Star Dances [Danse Lumiere]. Premier Performance: Choreography by Kathryn Roszak. A commissioned dance premiering at HW, with Hally Bellah-Guther, Rita Dantas Scott, Damon Mahoney, Lissa Resnick. The Star Dances take inspiration from Kepler’s “Music of the Spheres” and star/planet mapping by UC Berkeley astronomers. The elegant simplicity of Satie’s music creates an atmosphere for two and then three female dancers as the Three Graces, who echo the harmony of the spheres. Holst’s energetic two-piano version of “The Planets” provides a striking score for the more volatile activity of the stars. Computer models of colliding galaxies, unfolding anemones in space, provide inspiration for a duet.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
10:00 am until noon & 1:30 until 4:00 pm
Recap of Friday and Introduction of Saturday Program (Patricia Lundberg)
Galileo and the Telescope: The Instrument That Changed Astronomy. Paula Findlen (History, Stanford University). In 1609 an Italian mathematics professor, Galileo Galilei, devised a telescope based on reports of a spyglass that could magnify things at a distance. He turned it on the heavens and saw things no one had ever seen before: the imperfections of the moon’s surface, the composition of the Milky Way, and the hitherto unknown satellites of Jupiter. Galileo’s report of these discoveries, the Sidereal Messenger (1610), became a landmark publication in the history of astronomy and made him one of the most important and ultimately controversial astronomers of his time. How did Galileo and his instrument change astronomy? What is the significance of his accomplishment at the distance of 400 years?
Galileo Meets Darwin: The Search for Life in the Universe. Geoff Marcy (Astronomy, UC Berkeley). Science fiction assumes that our Milky Way Galaxy abounds with habitable planets populated by advanced civilizations engaged in interstellar commerce and conflict. Even Kepler wrote a science-fiction work about travelling in the solar system. Back in our real universe, Earth-like planets and alien life have proved elusive. Has science fiction led us astray? This year, astronomers launched the first searches for Earth-like worlds around other stars, using bizarre, extreme telescopes for the task. For the first time, these telescopes have fundamentally superseded Galileo’s historic little scope. A wild race for signs of inhabited worlds and extraterrestrial life is about to begin.
Performance: Copernicus Comments on Modern Astronomical Ideas
George Hammond (SF Attorney and Author) impersonates Copernicus, wryly commenting on the “hot ideas” of 21st Century cosmology, dismissing those that look like “yet another epicycle dead end” and passionately predicting those that will lead to the next Copernican Revolution.
Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe. Alex Filippenko (Astronomy, UC Berkeley). Observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down as would be expected due to gravity. Other, completely independent data strongly support this amazing conclusion. Over the largest distances, our Universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive “dark energy,” stretching the very fabric of space itself faster and faster with time. The physical nature of dark energy is often considered to be the most important unsolved problem in physics; it probably provides clues to a unified quantum theory of gravity.
Panel Discussion with all presenters and written questions from the audience
Presenters
Clifford (Kip) Cranna is Director of Musical Administration at San Francisco Opera, where he has been on the staff since 1979. He has served as vocal adjudicator for numerous groups including the Metropolitan Opera National Council. He holds a BA in choral conducting from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in musicology from Stanford University. 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. He was named 2006 “Man of the Year” by Il Cenacolo, a SF men’s Italian cultural organization. In 2008 he was awarded the SF Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor.
Alex Filippenko received his PhD in Astronomy from Caltech in 1984 and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1986, where he is a leading authority on exploding stars, active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmology. He has coauthored nearly 600 scientific publications, is one of the world’s most highly cited astronomers, and has won numerous prizes for his research, most recently the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize. He was the only person to be a member of both teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which was selected as the “Top Science Breakthrough of 1998” by the editors of Science. He has won the highest teaching awards at UC Berkeley, where students have voted him the “Best Professor” on campus six times. In 2006, he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. The recipient of the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, he has appeared in numerous television documentaries, produced four astronomy video courses, and coauthored an award-winning textbook.
Paula Findlen is Professor and Chair of History; Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Co-Director of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program; all at Stanford University. Her interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. She is “fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society.” Some publications include “Historical Thought in the Renaissance,” in Companion to Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Blackwell, 2002); “Building the House of Knowledge: The Structures of Thought in Late Renaissance Europe,” in Tore Frangsmyr, ed.,The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning since the Renaissance (Berkeley, 2001); (ed.) The Italian Renaissance: Essential Readings (Blackwell, 2002). “Men, Moments and Machines” special on the History Channel: “Galileo and the Sinful Spyglass.”
Roger Hahn is an emeritus professor of Graduate Studies in the History Department at UC Berkeley, where he has taught history of science to hundreds of students for over 45 years. At Berkeley he was Director of the Office for History of Science and Technology and has published widely on related cultural and scientific issues. He is the author of a biography of the mathematician and astronomer Laplace.Currently he is Vice-President of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences. He was educated at Harvard University (AB and MAT), Cornell University (PhD), and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Roger and his wife have been long time supporters of Humanities West, and he has been Moderator as well as presenter for a number of Humanities West programs.
George Hammond is known to Humanities West audiences for his previous presentations on Mark Twain in 2005, Plato in 2006 as part of the Sicily seminar, and Pythagoras in 2008. George is a San Francisco corporate attorney who specializes in international mergers and acquisitions. He is also the author of four novels, a collection of short stories and six philosophical books on issues in rational idealism, theoretical physics, Plato’s theory, early Christianity, the Soviet Union, psychology and constitutional law. His indebtedness to Pythagorean thought is pithily expressed in the name of his website: pythpress.com.
Geoffrey W. Marcy is a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University. He is also the director of Berkeley’s “Center for Integrative Planetary Science,” a research unit that studies the formation, geophysics, chemistry and evolution of planets. Marcy’s research focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs. His team discovered the majority of the 350 known planets around other stars, including the first multiple-planet system, the first Saturn-mass planets, and the first Neptune-mass planet. His goal is to discover the first earth-like planets and to find other planetary systems like our own solar system. Marcy is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Shaw Prize in 2005, Discovery Magazine’s Space Scientist of the Year in 2003, the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the Carl Sagan Award, the Beatrice Tinsley Prize, and the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Kathryn Roszak is Artistic Director, Danse Lumiere. She previously created choreography to music based on star maps at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Danse Lumiere (formerly Anima Mundi) was founded in 1995 and creates dance theater linking the arts, environment, and humanity. The company has collaborated with visual artists, composers, scientists, and writers. Recent productions have included writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder. The company has won many grants and awards, including from Laurance S. Rockefeller, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Fleischhacker Foundation, Guzik Foundation, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. Danse Lumiere has been presented locally at Theater Artaud, Grace Cathedral, Cowell Theater, University of San Francisco, Yoshi’s Jazz House, Asian Art Museum, and in New York by La MaMa Theater. The company’s collaboration with mathematicians was presented by Copenhagen Cultural Festival in Denmark. The company was also invited to perform at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West and at Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Kathryn Roszak trained on Ford Foundation Scholarships at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and at the SF Ballet School. She received her theater training with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and with American Conservatory Theater’s MFA Program. She danced with the SF Opera Ballet and has choreographed and taught for the SF Opera Center and ACT. Her original choreography has won awards from the Carlisle Choreography Project and from the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program. She writes on dance for Theater Bay Area Magazine and teaches for the Lines Ballet/Dominican University BFA in Dance Program and for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley.
Alexander Zwissler is Executive Director/ CEO of the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland California (www.chabotspace.org). The Center, a Smithsonian Affiliate, is an interactive Science Center whose mission is to inspire and educate students of all ages about the Planet Earth and the Universe. Prior to Chabot, Zwissler was Executive Director of the Fort Mason Foundation in San Francisco from 1999 to 2006. Earlier, Zwissler had a 17-year career in the cable television and telecommunications industry. He was a Director of ComTel, the United Kingdom’s fourth largest cable television and Telephone Company, with responsibility for Internet products, interactive services and digital television. Previous positions include General Manager of Oxford Cable Ltd., Oxford, England, President of Ventura County Cablevision, President of Las Cruces TV Cable, and President of Concord TV Cable. The American companies were all divisions of Western Communications, the Cable Television arm of the SF Chronicle Publishing Company. Zwissler was born in Stuttgart Germany, moved to California with his family, and was raised in Oakland. There he attended public schools before earning a BA in Political Science, with Honors, at UC Berkeley. After graduating, Zwissler was a Postgraduate Research Fellow at the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester, England, conducting research on the development of international satellite broadcasting. Zwissler serves currently on the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Market Street Railway, Tau Kappa Epsilon at UC Berkeley, and the Non Profit Centers Network. Zwissler has also served on the Boards of the Oxfordshire Foundation, the Conejo Future Foundation, the SF Business Arts Council, the National Park Service Friends Alliance and the American Southwest Theatre Company.
Confronting Napoleon: European Culture at the Crossroads
April 17-18, 2009
The institution-shattering forces unleashed by the French Revolution were successfully refocused upon Europe by Napoleon. The French tide swept over the continent, and even across the Mediterranean, leaving the remnants of many ancien regimes refashioned in its wake. The responses to France’s reassertion of cultural preeminence varied from uncritical enthusiasm to repugnance, and from nuanced appreciation to the love-hate affair the Russian aristocracy carried on for the next century. Napoleon invaded Egypt yet crafted enlightened policy sympathetic to Islam, resurrected Roman civil law, inspired Beethoven, challenged Goethe and Tolstoy to think again, and bankrolled a return to grandeur in the fine arts. Only the British successfully resisted both his armies and his cultural influence.
Moderator: Roger Hahn, Emeritus Professor, Graduate School, UC Berkeley
Friday, April 17, 2009
8 pm to 10:15 pm
Napoleon — the Grandeur Restored Keynote Address by Steven Englund(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Paris [now part of New York University]) Napoleon the man, Napoleon the general, and Napoleon the Emperor; what elements led to the election and rise to power of the 27-year-old minor Italian nobleman? Napoleon provided the promise of glory for the French following the horrors of the revolution, but many additional factors influenced his ability to mesmerize the world.
Napoleon and the Visual Arts Michael Marrinan(Stanford University) Napoleon spent lavishly on the arts of all media: from grand-scale projects of architecture to finely-wrought personal objects; from wall-sized paintings to books and prints; from monumental sculptures to porcelains of extreme elegance. Across this broad spectrum of patronage, no single style can be called emblematic of the Empire. How could it? Napoleon emerged from the ruins of the First Republic to erect a government of social and political elites that mirrored the hierarchies of the old monarchy without renouncing completely the achievements of the Great Revolution. Artists were asked for imagery and symbols to legitimate Napoleonic rule as both a break from the past and an extension of it. Thus, the Emperor’s coronation invoked Charlemagne as historical pedigree to bypass conveniently the line of kings ousted by the Revolution. Public works of classical allusion figured Paris as the new Rome and center of a new Empire. By contrast, history painters were encouraged to break with the Academy’s preference for antiquity by commissioning pictures of contemporary events in modern dress. Sculptors exchanged heroic nudes for military heroes in uniform. Designers of interiors, furnishings, and objects for Napoleon did not eschew the craft and elegance of pre-Revolutionary aristocratic culture, but reshaped them with a functional sobriety in tune with the Emperor’s rationalist pragmatism. A survey of the arts under Napoleon will demonstrate that aesthetic productions of the Empire mirror the myriad political contradictions of their patron.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
10:00 am-12 noon and 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Napoleon — Napoleonic Code, Administration Highlights Laurent Mayali(UC Berkeley Law School) This lecture focuses on the civil law reforms instituted by Napoleon, and the other positive cultural legacies of his short-lived empire.
Tolstoy’s Napoleon: A Dethronement Luba Golburt(UC Berkeley) Napoleon was an enigmatic leader, possessed of great charisma and strategic insight. This is precisely the image that the iconoclast Leo Tolstoy consistently undermines throughout his monumental War and Peace. This lecture traces some of the stages of Napoleon’s dethronement in the novel, examining Napoleon the character’s physique, mannerisms, and his mistaken notions of hero-centered adoration.
Ludwig van Beethoven on Napoleon Pianist Teresa Yu(San Francisco Conservatory) A performance of Beethoven’s virtuosic “Eroica Variations,” Op. 35, a set of fifteen variations for solo piano dating from 1802, and based on the same theme Beethoven used in the finale of his “Eroica” Symphony (No. 3), composed the following year and originally dedicated to Napoleon. Typical of the groundbreaking composer, he makes important departures from the standard theme-and-variations form, including a masterful fugue as the finale.
Egyptomania or Orientalism?: Painting Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egypt Juan Cole(University of Michigan) The painters who, in subsequent decades, took up the themes of Bonaparte’s Egyptian conquest contrasted splendor and squalor, courage and barbarism, science and fanaticism, masculine vigor and feminine languor. In their stereotypes of East and West, and in the ways that they referred back to traditions of depicting the Orient, some used the expedition as a canvass on which to imagine a Middle East that Europe could and should dominate. Others explored the barbarity of Bonaparte’s own military policies, turning the French expedition into a critique of Western militarism. These differences among the painters reflected European struggles over values of peace versus imperialism as the nineteenth century unfolded.
Panel Discussion A discussion with questions from the Audience.
Presenters
Juan Cole, History, U Michigan
Steven Englund, History, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Luba Golburt, Slavic Studies, UC Berkeley
Roger Hahn, History, UC Berkeley
Laurent Mayali, Law, UC Berkeley
Michael Marrinan, Art History, Stanford
Teresa Yu, Dean, Santa Clara University
India Rising: Tradition Meets Modernity
February 27-28, 2009
India’s artists, in pace with their country’s rapid modernization, have adopted many contemporary techniques. Yet past traditions remain strong. Familiar themes and modern modes of expression interplay with fruitful creative tension. Abstract and surrealist artists incorporate images of legendary gods and heroes in their work, and musicians create exciting new sounds in collaboration with Western jazz and classical performers. Literature and cinema with rural village scenes compete with others featuring urban landscapes, Indian-American cultural fusion, and the seductive joys of Bollywood. The result: unique new delights for the eye, the ear, and the spirit.
Moderator: Raka Ray (Sarah Kailath Chair in Indian Studies, Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies, and Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley)
Friday, February 27, 2009
7:30 pm – 8:00 pm Special Pre-program Performance: Indian Classical Musicians Joanna Mack and Tim Witter
Joanna Mack began her pursuit of Classical North Indian Music in 1997. While studying Neuroscience at UCSD, she attended a Classical Indian Music class with sitar virtuoso Kartik Seshadri, a senior disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar of the Maihar Gharana. She had been involved in Western music since childhood but was immediately drawn to Indian music. She abandoned her plan for medical school and devoted herself to Indian Classical Music. Kartikji recommended her to Pandit Deepak Choudhuri, another senior disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar. That year, Joanna traveled to India where she studied under him through 2005. Joanna then returned to the United States, promising Deepakji that she would continue her studies and pass on the values and ideas of the Maihar Gharana. She teaches private and group classes and performs in a variety of venues. She continues her studies with classes under Ustad Ali Akbar Khan at the Ali Akbar College of Musicand is under the guidance of Maestro Kartik Seshadri.
Tim Witter began his tabla training with Ustad Alla Rakha in 1980. He has studied since 1985 with Pandit Swapan Chauduri, the resident tabla teacher at the Ali Akbar College of Music. He has made numerous trips to India for study and performance, and in 1994-1995 completed a research/performance grant awarded to him by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Tim has taught at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel, Switzerland and has performed throughout Europe. Currently he is a staff teacher at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California as well as being an active performer and composer in Bay Area Indian classical and contemporary music scenes. In addition to studying tabla, Tim has lived in Madras, India and studied South Indian drumming from T.H. Subash Chandran. Tim was a co-recipient of the 1997 Isadora Duncan Award for Best Original Music for a New Dance Piece for his work in creating the score for “Sacred Text.”
8:00 pm – 10:15 pm India Rising: the Soft Power of an Ancient Land in the 21st century Keynote Lecture by Shashi Tharoor, Chairman, Afras Ventures Many thinkers and writers in recent years have spoken of India’s geo-strategic advantages, its economic dynamism, political stability, proven military capabilities, its nuclear, space and missile programmes, and the country’s growing pool of young and skilled manpower as assuring India “great power” status as a “world leader” in the new century. Dr Shashi Tharoor, author and former UN Under-Secretary-General, argues that it these not these elements that represent India’s greatest potential as it seeks to play its role in our globalizing world. Instead, he focuses on the “soft power” of India, its attributes and limitations and the challenges it faces, as he outlines India’s true place in Asia and the world and what it could mean for the country’s future in the 21st century.
Indian Art: Tradition Meets Modernity Santhi Kavuri-Bauer(Assistant Professor, Art History, San Francisco State University) This illustrated lecture will trace the development of modern art in India starting with the adaptation of the academic style by Raja Ravi Varma in the 1880s through the period of creative tension among those seeking to reconcile Western styles with traditional subject matter and practice, including Abindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Amrita Sher Gil. After Independence, artists like M.F. Hussain, Jamini Roy and F.N. Souza began to explore more abstract and personal themes. Professor Kavuri-Bauer concludes by focusing on several contemporary artists, who combine traditional symbols, forms and processes with modern media techniques, such as digital photography, and address the important social issues facing India today.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
10 am to noon and 1:30 to 4 pm
Sacred Games: A Reading Vikram Chandra(Senior Lecturer, UC Berkeley) One of modern India’s greatest novelists will read from and describe his best known work, the epicSacred Games, a Victorian-Indian-gangster-spy-family saga, placing his work into the broad context of Indian literature today.
Indian Music: Traditions and Transitions Dard Neuman (Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music, UC Santa Cruz) lectures on Indian music and demonstrates the sitar, with rare recordings.
Special Performance: Indian Classical Musicians Joanna Mack and Tim Witter
Joanna Mack began her pursuit of Classical North Indian Music in 1997. While studying Neuroscience at UCSD, she attended a Classical Indian Music class with sitar virtuoso Kartik Seshadri, a senior disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar of the Maihar Gharana. She had been involved in Western music since childhood but was immediately drawn to Indian music. She abandoned her plan for medical school and devoted herself to Indian Classical Music. Kartikji recommended her to Pandit Deepak Choudhuri, another senior disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar. That year, Joanna traveled to India where she studied under him through 2005. Joanna then returned to the United States, promising Deepakji that she would continue her studies and pass on the values and ideas of the Maihar Gharana. She teaches private and group classes and performs in a variety of venues. She continues her studies with classes under Ustad Ali Akbar Khan at the Ali Akbar College of Musicand is under the guidance of Maestro Kartik Seshadri.
Tim Witter began his tabla training with Ustad Alla Rakha in 1980. He has studied since 1985 with Pandit Swapan Chauduri, the resident tabla teacher at the Ali Akbar College of Music. He has made numerous trips to India for study and performance, and in 1994-1995 completed a research/performance grant awarded to him by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Tim has taught at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel, Switzerland and has performed throughout Europe. Currently he is a staff teacher at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California as well as being an active performer and composer in Bay Area Indian classical and contemporary music scenes. In addition to studying tabla, Tim has lived in Madras, India and studied South Indian drumming from T.H. Subash Chandran. Tim was a co-recipient of the 1997 Isadora Duncan Award for Best Original Music for a New Dance Piece for his work in creating the score for “Sacred Text.”
Mirrors of Tradition and Modernity: Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Independent Cinema and Bollywood Dilip Basu (Founding Director, Archives and Study Center on Satyajit Ray, University of California Santa Cruz, and Associate Professor of History). This lecture with film clips will argue that the cinema of Satyajit Ray and his cohorts in post-independent India remain quintessentially modern; popular cinema, both past and present, use the modern cinematic medium to the fullest while following the traditional Indian dramaturgy in form and content. Reality Television and the New India Raka Ray The Indian Idol phenomenon, in which the women and the rich men were voted off first in support of upward mobility for the poor Nepalese boy who eventually wins, in a sense causes the upward mobility of his whole community, generating pride within the regionally underserved.
Panel Discussion Led by Moderator Raka Ray.
Presenters
Dilip Basu, , UC Santa Cruz
Vikram Chandra, UC Berkeley
Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Art History, San Francisco State University
Dard Neuman, Musicology, UC Santa Cruz
Raka Ray, History, UC Berkeley
Shashi Thoroor, diplomacy, New York, India
Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of America
October 17-18, 2008
How did 13 weak, fragmented, and isolated colonies governed from across the ocean transform themselves into a new kind of society based on pragmatism, optimism, innovation, and cooperation; a society capable not only of defeating a much larger and stronger foe, but also of inventing entirely new forms of self-government that have stood the test of time? Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), during his long and incredibly productive life, epitomized many aspects of the remarkable transformation that eventually led to the establishment of the first modern constitutional state. With his passion for self-improvement and gift for institutional innovation, Franklin constantly reinvented himself: printer’s apprentice, successful Philadelphia printer, storekeeper, bookshop owner, journalist, writer of Poor Richard’s Almanack and the Autobiography, and social entrepreneur and environmentalist 1731-style. Franklin invented the Franklin stove, swim fins, the glass armonica, and bifocals. He tamed lightning with his kite. He was a politician, diplomat, colonial patriot, ambassador to France, president of the Executive Council of Pennsylvania, signer of the Constitution, and author of an anti-slavery treatise. In one person, Benjamin Franklin helped create the American civil society. He was called, by the time of his death at 84, the “harmonious human multitude.”
Moderator: Dee Andrews(Chair of History, CSU East Bay)
Friday, October 17, 2008
8 pm to 10:15 pm
Benjamin Franklin, Social Revolutionist, in Philadelphia, America’s First City Gary B. Nash(Emeritus, History, UCLA) Ben Franklin went to Philadelphia at 17, and became an active leader in its social, political, economic, and cultural life for decades. A passion for self-improvement combined with gift for institutional innovation helped lay the foundation for a very successful civil society. He was instrumental in founding a society for sharing knowledge, a community library, a public hospital, a college, a volunteer fire department, and an efficient postal service. These activities, plus his work as a printer, publisher, and author, helped create a civil society that was increasingly self-confident, self-sufficient, and innovative.
GLASS-ICAL MUSICK Dennis James, Musica Curiosa A witty survey of the history of the glass music focusing on the development Benjamin Franklin’s 1761 musical instrument invention, the glass armonica. Original 18th and 19th century compositions specifically composed for glass instruments by such composers as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig von Beethoven, Joseph Schmittbaur and many others are interspersed throughout. The slide-illustrated presentation balances music, scientific and historical information.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
10 am to noon and 1:30 to 4 pm
Benjamin Franklin, Scientist Jessica Riskin(Associate Professor, History, Stanford) As a scientist and inventor, Franklin always tried to apply knowledge to practical problems and to ensure that society would benefit from the widespread sharing of knowledge. His discoveries related to electricity led to the invention of the lightning rod. His many household inventions improved the quality of life for the masses, while his founding of the American Philosophical Society encouraged collaboration among leading intellectuals. Partly through his efforts, a culture of pragmatism, optimism, and experimentation took deep root in the American colonies. In addition to a brief discussion of the impressive breadth of Franklin’s activities as a scientist and inventor, Professor Riskin will discuss Franklin’s particular approach to natural science and focus largely on his electrical physics: what he considered to count (or not to count) as a good explanation, what sorts of assumptions he made, and how his natural science was deeply connected with his moral thinking and with the contemporary cultural and political context.
Benjamin Franklin, Democrat and Diplomat Jack N. Rakove(Professor of History, Stanford University and Pulitzer Prize Winner) Benjamin Franklin became America’s Ambassador to the World. Much of his later life was spent in England and France, defending the interests of the American colonies first from within the structure of the British Empire, and eventually working with Britain’s enemies to win full independence. For many European intellectual and political leaders, Franklin came to personify the spirit of Colonial America: open, direct, confident, persistent, practical, and trustworthy.
Musical Performance London Quartet(Marin) Movements from Benjamin Franklin’s Quartet No. 2 in F major for Three Violins and Cello and from W. A. Mozart’s Quartet No.14 In G Major, K.387. Steve Machtinger on viola, Zina Schiff and Oscar Hasbun on violin, and Louella Hasbun on cello. The Invention of Ben Franklin Dee Andrews(Professor and Chair, History, CSU East Bay) This lecture will explore Franklin’s conscious manipulation of his own image through writings like the Autobiography and images in the elite and popular media in America and Europe, including souvenirs and artifacts from his years as a renowned scientist and as a diplomat in France. It will also touch on the growth of his reputation in America long after his death.
Panel Discussion The moderator will lead a discussion with audience participation welcome.
