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Calendar of Events, 2005–2006
Center & Clark Core Program, 2005–2006
Music Programs, 2005–06The Year at a Glance
Click to view general information, including the location of the programs.
Touring the Clark Library
Exhibits at the Clark Library
The Year at a Glance
Sun. Oct. 9 Concert — American String Quartet
Sat. Nov. 5 Lecture - Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade
Sun. Nov. 6 Concert - Sequenza
Sat./Sun. Nov 19-20 Concerts — Paris Piano Trio
Sun. Dec. 4 Concert - St. Petersburg String Quartet — (Chamber Music Fundraiser)
Sun. Feb. 5 Concert - Artemis Quartet
Sat., March 18 "Deep Like the Rivers": African-American Poets of Los Angeles
Sun. Apr. 2 Concert — Pavel Haas Quartet
Sun./Mon. June 11-12 The Legacies of Richard Popkin, Jeremy Popkin, (University of Kentucky)
— Touring the Clark Library —
Guided tours of the Clark are available to interested members of the public.
Tours, each lasting about 45 mintes, are scheduled on Wednesday between 10:00 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Reservations are required. For information and appointments call 323-735-7605.****************************************************************
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— Library Exhibits, 2004-2005 —Exhibits can be viewed during scheduled public programs
and as part of guided tours of the library and grounds (see above).Click to view Clark Library location and contact information.
Center & Clark Core Program, 2005-2006
Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life and Death
Directed by
Helen Deutsch, English, UCLA, & Mary Terrall, History, UCLA
In the wake of Descartes, many writers and readers in the eighteenth century worried about how to think about matter, and the potential of matter, to move, organize itself, respond to outside influences, and eventually decompose. We propose to look at the many ways of theorizing about and experimenting with matter in this period, with particular attention to life as a subject for analysis, speculation, and portrayal (literary and pictorial). Extending our approach well beyond the life sciences, we will structure our inquiries around three different kinds of moments: conception, life, and death. We are aiming to situate the history of materialism within a larger history of ideas, but also in a range of literary, cultural, and scientific practices. This takes us into consideration of the relation of the mind to the body, the brain to the soul, the physical to the abstract, the empirical/experimental to the theoretical, the concrete to the speculative or conjectural. Thus our concern is with method as well as concepts.
Scholars of history, philosophy, literature, and political science have studied the significance of materialism for the various strains of thought contesting with each other to structure modern conceptions of sensibility, sociability, ethics, and aesthetics. The Enlightenment preoccupation with matter has fed into not only academic investigations of materialist philosophy, but also scholarly approaches to the material world of the eighteenth century (think of the field's current preoccupation with material culture and the world of "things"), while informing the division in current eighteenth-century scholarship between materialism as philosophical object (intellectual history, history of science), and materialism as analytical practice (cultural and feminist studies, historians of the body, Marxist critics). Our goal is to relocate the eighteenth-century fascination with the material at the crossroads of literature, science, philosophy, and history, thus rejuxtaposing the material object, and materialism as object, with critical materialism.
Bringing together literary scholars with historians of art, science, medicine. and philosophy, the series of conferences will address the varieties of eighteenth-century materialism at this interdisciplinary juncture. Topics will include bodies and ideas, the life of fictional creations and apparitions, pre- and post-mortem dissections, inspiration, material manifestations of immaterial forces, sensory perception, and representation. One aspect of our project that crosses a variety of topics would be the transmission of life and self across time: How did scientific and literary figures conceptualize the inheritance of traits and how did materialist notions of the corporeal self affect religious conceptions of identity and afterlife? If memory held the self together, could immortality be achieved by registering the remnants of the self in the memory of posterity through print? Organizing the series thematically will allow conversations among scholars from the different disciplines around conception (ideational and physical), birth, and death. Otherwise construed, our topic might be framed as scientific and literary investigations of life: what distinguishes the organic and how it functions in the social world.
October 28–29: Conception
February 3–4: Life
March 10–11: Death
May 19– 20: Borders of the Animate
Academic and Public Programs,
2005-2006
Unless otherwise noted, all programs will be held at the
Clark Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.
Click here for directions to the Clark.
Limited seating at the Clark makes advance registration necessary for all programs.
Registration fees cover the cost of lunches and refreshments and,
where applicable, the distribution of advance copies of papers.Inquiries should be addressed to the Center office at 310 Royce Hall, UCLA
Phone: 310-206-8552; E-mail: c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu )
To receive routine mailings about Center & Clark programs,
please sign up to be on the Center/Clark mailing list.
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September 30 - October 1, 2005Transformations: Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Religion, Texts, Culturesa conference arranged by Lorna Clymer, California State University, Bakersfield
This conference addresses transformative interactions among religion, texts, and cultures during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries in the British Isles, the European continent, and European settlements. The primary focus is the interaction of religious texts and Christian cultures. Such interaction can be found in Anglican, Catholic, and Dissenting practices, theology, politics, and in related definitions of the self, communities, and nations.
Each presenter will consider a text that contributed to or represents a cultural transformation, in which new practices were established, and by which important values or identities were defined. The role of religion in cultural transformation is evidenced by various texts, such as editions of the Bible, sermons, prayer books, devotional and conduct manuals, hymnals, poetry, allegories, didactic fiction and drama, tracts, and treatises.
Topics to be considered include: religious traditions evolving in print and in oral practices; discussions of miracles; the influence of the Book of Common Prayer; connections between orthodox Christianity and philosophy or science; convergences of Biblical scholarship and early modern musicology; worship as defined by theology and poetics; interactions of non-Christian religions with Christianity; and appropriations of pagan texts for Christian purposes.
The secular focus of some “Enlightenment” studies may on occasion tend to undervalue the continuing centrality of religion. This conference will explore some of the complexities of early modern cultures in which life was integrally connected with or defined by religion.
Registration deadline—September 23
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
October 7-8, 2005The Political Culture of the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1566-1648
Cosponsored by the Netherlands Consulate General of Los Angeles and the
Centrum voor de Studie van de Gouden Eeuw, Universiteit van Amsterdama conference arranged by Peter Arnade, California State University, San Marcos,
Margaret C. Jacob, UCLA, and Henk van Nierop, Universiteit van AmsterdamThe multi-pronged series of events known as the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648) is one of early modern Europe's greatest upheavals. The Revolt resulted in the dismissal by the Estates General of the Netherlands of the Spanish Habsburg Philip II as monarch, and in the establishment of a commonwealth that became an economic and cultural bellwether of seventeenth-century Europe. Participants in the Revolt hotly debated theories of political resistance, the limits of monarchical rule, and the value of popular sovereignty. In the religious sphere, important deliberations over the accommodation of difference and liberty of conscience took place, while Catholics and Calvinists squared off over the practice of their faiths. The Revolt transpired within an urban world whose forms of sociability anticipated the Habermasian public sphere of later liberal society. The Revolt also reverberated throughout Europe, and drew many key states into its orbit. Still, the events of the Dutch Revolt are not fully appreciated in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. Even within the Dutch and Belgian tradition of scholarship on the Revolt, there has been no comprehensive effort to assess the popular media of the Dutch Revolt and its general political culture. This interdisciplinary conference brings together specialists in history, art history, and literature from the U.S., Belgium, England, France, and the Netherlands to explore the cultural forms --pamphlets, broadsheets, theater, popular prints, balladry, and ceremony, among others-- deployed by participants in the Revolt to stake out political and religious commitments and to forge a rebellion.
Conference papers will be accessible from this page as they are received, two weeks before and two weeks after the conference. They will be mailed to registrants by request.
Registration deadline—September 23
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
October 9 (Saturday), 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
American String Quartet
Peter Winograd, Violin
Laurie Carney, Violin
Daniel Avshalomov, Viola
Margo Drakos, CelloInternationally recognized as one of the world's finest quartets, the American String Quartet is celebrating its 30th anniversary during 2005-2006. Formed in 1974, when its original members were students at The Juilliard School, the American String Quartet was launched by winning both the Coleman Competition and the Naumburg Award in the same year. In three decades of touring, the Quartet has performed in all fifty states and appeared in virtually every important concert hall throughout the world. Their presentations of the complete quartets of Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Bartók and Mozart have won widespread critical acclaim. The 1998 MusicMasters Complete Mozart String Quartets performed on a matched quartet set of instruments by Stradivarius are widely considered to have set the standard for this repertoire.
Resident quartet at the Aspen Music Festival since 1974 and the Manhattan School of Music in New York since 1984, the American also has served as resident quartet at the Taos School of Music (1979 to 1998), the Peabody Conservatory, and the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The Quartet's diverse activities also have included numerous international radio and television broadcasts, tours of Asia, and performances with the New York City Ballet, the Montreal Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Their extensive discography can be heard on the Albany, CRI, MusicMasters, Musical Heritage Society, Nonesuch and RCA labels. The Quartet is popular with national radio audiences and has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio's St. Paul Sunday Morning, National Public Radio's All Things Considered and live broadcasts on WFMT.
Individually, the members devote additional time outside the quartetfs active performance and teaching schedule to solo appearances, recitals and master classes.
— P R O G R A M —
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quartet in F Major, K. 590 ("Prussian")
Dmitri Shostakovitch
String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Maurice Ravel
String Quartet in F Major
— R E C E P T I O N —
Reservation lottery submission deadline: September 12
Admission: $20 per personReservation by lottery form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
October 21-22, 2005The Arabian Nights in Historical Context:
From Galland to Burtona conference arranged by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA
In 1789 Horace Walpole remarked on the narrative power of The Arabian Nights: "Read Sindbad the Sailor's voyages, and you will be sick of Aeneas's." The appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717) constituted a significant cultural event. The Arabian Nights (known as Alf layla wa-layla in some Arabic versions) told by Sheherazade to King Shahiryar to prevent her murder presented a coherent, evocative way of imagining the Muslim East. The collection of tales was widely serialized, adapted, and abridged: by 1800 there were eighty English versions. In addition to Arabic, French, and English editions, Bengali, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu, and Yiddish translations appeared. Later editors included Edward Lane (1839-41), John Payne (1882-84), and most notably Richard Burton (1885-86) who also translated the Kama Sutra. The tales were also re-imagined in children's books. In short, The Arabian Nights offers a fascinating window into Europe's understanding of the "East" over two centuries.
Registration deadline— October 14
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
October 28-29, 2005Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views
of Conception, Life and Death
Part 1 — ConceptionDirected by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall, UCLA
In the wake of Descartes, many writers and readers in the eighteenth century worried about how to think about matter, and the potential of matter to move, organize itself, respond to outside influences, and eventually decompose. We propose to look at the many ways of theorizing about and experimenting with matter in this period, with particular attention to life as a subject for analysis, speculation, and portrayal (literary and pictorial). Extending our approach well beyond the life sciences, we will structure our inquiries around three different kinds of moments--conception, life, and death—and conclude with a conference on the indeterminate borders between them. We aim to situate the history of materialism within a larger history of ideas, but also in a range of literary, cultural, and scientific practices. This points us toward consideration of the relation of the body to the mind, the brain to the soul, the physical to the abstract, the empirical/experimental to the theoretical, the concrete to the speculative or conjectural. Thus our concern is with method as well as with concepts.
Scholars of history, philosophy, literature, and political science have studied the significance of materialism for the various strains of thought contesting with each other to structure modern conceptions of sensibility, sociability, ethics, and aesthetics. Bringing together literary scholars with historians of art, science, medicine, law, and philosophy, our series of conferences will address the varieties of eighteenth-century materialism at this interdisciplinary juncture. Topics will include bodies and ideas, the life of fictional creations and apparitions, pre- and post-mortem dissections, public executions, inspiration, material manifestations of immaterial forces, sensory perception, and representation.
In keeping with our organization of each conference around a particular narrative moment in the life cycle, we are especially interested in the transmission of life and self across time: how, for example, did scientific and literary figures conceptualize the inheritance of traits? How did materialist notions of the corporeal self affect religious conceptions of identity and afterlife? If memory held the self together, could immortality be achieved by registering the remnants of the self in the minds of posterity through the materiality of print? Otherwise construed, our topic might be framed as an interdisciplinary investigation of life: what distinguishes the organic and how it functions in the social world.
Our opening session on Conception will address questions around the moment of coming-into-being of life, which was often interpreted as a critical discontinuity beyond the reach of mechanics. We conceive this broad topic as the physical conception (and generation) of bodies as well as conception in the ideational sense. Spontaneous generation (the production of life from non-living matter), the material aspects of inspiration, the effect of the mother's imagination on the matter of her fetus, all are aspects of a phenomenon that binds the emanations of mind and spirit to the origins of life itself.
Registration deadline— October 21
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
November 5, 2005The inaugural Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade
The Art and Politics of Slander, Paris and London 1770-1800
ROBERT DARNTON
Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History at Princeton UniversityThis lecture investigates the vast but unstudied literature of libel that flooded the French book market in the eighteenth century. By concentrating on four interconnected libelles from 1771 to 1793, it combines an analysis of the genre with an account of a colony of French expatriates in London, who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and grafted a blackmail operation onto their literary speculations. Their adventures and misadventures, along with the attempts of secret agents from the Paris police to eliminate them, provide a rocambolersque tale that leads directly into the French Revolution. The same genre, developed by many of the same authors, fueled polemics right through the Terror, but its substance changed while its form remained the same. The literature of libel therefore shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Ancien Regime and became absorbed in a new political culture, one that reached its extreme point under Robespierre but that drew on ingredients from the world of Grub Street under Louis XV.
Robert Darnton is Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History at Princeton University. His research focuses on 18th-century France with special interest in the literary world, censorship, and the history of books. Professor Darnton also is the director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media. His publications include The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, (Vintage, 1984); The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, (Harvard University Press, 1982); Berlin Journal: 1989-1990, (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991); and Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedia, 1775-1800, (Belknap Press, 1979). Professor Darnton is winner of numerous awards, including the French Prix Medicis, the Leo Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Princeton University's Behrman Humanities Award, the Gutenberg Prize, and the American Printing History Association Prize. In 1999 he was named a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur, the highest award given by the French government, in recognition of his work.
This is the inaugural presentation of the Kenneth Karmiole Lecture Series on the History of the Book Trade. Established by Kenneth Karmiole, a Santa Monica antiquarian bookseller, this annual lecture series will focus on the book trade in England and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Clark's growing collection of materials relating to the collecting, publishing, and dissemination of books in the early modern period, make this series particularly appropriate. Ken Karmiole has run his own rare book business in Los Angeles since 1976, and is a highly respected member of the book trade. The Center and the Clark are deeply grateful to Ken for this gift, and for the expression of faith in our programs and collections that it represents.
Admission is complimentary, but advance registration is required.
Registration deadline— October 31
Click here for a printable registration form.
November 6 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
Sequenza
Yael Weiss, piano
Mark Kaplan, violin
Adrian Brendel, celloSequenza features three of today's finest musicians performing together in an ensemble. The members of Sequenza — Yael Weiss, Mark Kaplan and Adrian Brendel — all have independent careers as soloists as well as chamber musicians. Whether playing the beloved classics or a newly commissioned masterpiece, Sequenza brings to each performance its distinctive blend of authority and experience, energy and passion.
Established in 2001, Sequenza has presented concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, including recent appearances at Princeton, UCLA and Oxford Universities, and for the Chamber Music Societies of Edinburgh, Pasadena, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Hampton. A performance of Beethoven's Triple Concerto at the Prague Festival was praised for its "rare timbral refinement, nobility and virtuosic brilliance among the brightest moments of this year's Festival" (Lidove noviny, Prague). Sequenza's radio show for St. Paul Sunday has just been broadcast nationally several times, and was selected for St. Paul Sunday's "Best of the Year" CD.
Upcoming plans include performances at the Kennedy Center and London's Wigmore Hall, a tour of Spain, and the premiering of a new Piano Trio by Paul Chihara.
This concert is made possible by the generous support of The Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles.
— P R O G R A M —
Joseph Haydn
Piano Trio in E Major, Hob. XV:28Maurice Ravel
Piano Trio in A Minor
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Trio in B-flat, Op. 97 (gThe Archdukeh)
— R E C E P T I O N —
Reservation lottery submission deadline: October 10
Admission: $20 per personReservation by lottery form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
November 19 (Saturday), 2:00 p.m.
and
November 20 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
Paris Piano Trio
Les Musiciens
Regis Pasquier, violin
Roland Pidoux, cello
Jean-Claude Pennetier, pianoThese three great French soloists have been connected by their love of chamber music since they were students together at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris. In fact, they made their first tour together when Regis Pasquier was just 13 years old. Each graduated with top honors from the Conservatory (where they all are now professors) and rapidly established a major solo career.
In all the years since, they have consistently made time to tour together on the continent, in England and in Canada. At the peak of their individual careers, they are making an increased commitment to the Trio, where they have the opportunity to express simultaneously their musical individuality and their total musical rapport. The Trio's first major tour of the United States, in January 1998, won superlatives from critics and presenters across the country, and it has since been re-engaged in major cities from Washington to Los Angeles. A very successful debut tour of Latin America in June 2000 also has been followed by several return visits.
The Trio's recordings include Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich on the Lyrinx label in 1998, the trios of Schubert and Brahms, and the chamber music of Chausson on the Harmonia Mundi label, all released under the name "Les Musiciens," by which they are known in Europe.
Saturday, November 19, 2005, 2:00 p.m. at the Clark Library
— P R O G R A M —
Ludwig van Beethoven
The Complete Trios for violin, cello and pianoTrio in E-flat Major, Op. 1, No. 1
Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 3
Trio in D Major, Op.70, No. 1 (gGhosth)
— R E C E P T I O N —
Sunday, November 20, 2005, 2:00 p.m. at the Clark Library
— P R O G R A M —
Ludwig van Beethoven
The Complete Trios for violin, cello and pianoTrio in G Major, Op. 1, No. 2
Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 2
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97 (gThe Archdukeh)
— R E C E P T I O N —
These concerts are made possible by the generosity of donors who wish to remain anonymous.
Reservation lottery submission deadline: October 17
Admission: $20 per person, per concert dateReservation by lottery form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
December 4 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
A Special Fundraising Event to Support the Clark Library Chamber Music Endowment Fund.
This concert is made possible by the generous support of Catherine and Ralph Benkaim.The series Chamber Music at the Clark is sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
St. Petersburg String Quartet
Alia Aranovskaya and David Chernyavsky, violins
Boris Vayner, viola
Leonid Shukayev, celloOne of the world's leading string quartets, the St. Petersburg was founded as the Leningrad Quartet by Alla Aranovskaya and Leonid Shukayev, both graduates of the Leningrad Conservatory. The Quartet blazed a trail through international chamber music competitions, winning First Prize at the All-Soviet Union String Quartet Competition, the Silver Medal and a Special Prize at the Tokyo International Competition of Chamber Ensembles, First Prize and both Special Prizes at the Vittorio Gui International Competition for Chamber Ensembles in Florence, Italy, and First Prize and the "Grand Prix Musica Viva" at the International Competition for Chamber Ensembles in Melbourne, Australia.
When the city of Leningrad resumed its historic name, the Quartet changed its name to the St. Petersburg String Quartet. The Quartet has continued its ascendancy, building a reputation of worldwide proportions including a Grammy nomination, "Best Record" honors in both Stereo Review and Gramophone Magazines, and the Chamber Music America/WQXR Prize for Best CD of 2001. The Quartet held the respected position of Quartet-in-Residence at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for five years.
Audiences from Toronto to Tokyo, from Lithuania to London and in concert halls across the United States give the St. Petersburg Quartet standing ovations. No classical CD collection is complete without recordings by the acclaimed group, which include the two Borodin Quartets on the Dorian label, the complete Shostakovich cycle on Hyperion, a disc of Prokofiev's two Quartets and Nadarejshvilifs String Quartet No. 1 and Glazunov's Quartet No. 5 and Novelettes on Delos.
The St. Petersburg String Quartet appears by arrangement with Lisa Sapinkopf Artists.
— P R O G R A M —
Alexander Borodin
Quartet No. 2 in D MajorDmitri Shostakovich
Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 108
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Pyotr Ilfych Tchaikovsky
Quartet No. 1, Op. 11 in D Major
— R E C E P T I O N —
Reservation lottery submission deadline: November 21
Admission: $75 per person, $60 of which is tax-deductibleReservation form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
February 3-4, 2006Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views
of Conception, Life and Death
Part 2 — LifeDirected by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall, UCLA
In the wake of Descartes, many writers and readers in the eighteenth century worried about how to think about matter, and the potential of matter to move, organize itself, respond to outside influences, and eventually decompose. We propose to look at the many ways of theorizing about and experimenting with matter in this period, with particular attention to life as a subject for analysis, speculation, and portrayal (literary and pictorial). Extending our approach well beyond the life sciences, we will structure our inquiries around three different kinds of moments—conception, life, and death—and conclude with a conference on the indeterminate borders between them. We aim to situate the history of materialism within a larger history of ideas, but also in a range of literary, cultural, and scientific practices. This points us toward consideration of the relation of the body to the mind, the brain to the soul, the physical to the abstract, the empirical/experimental to the theoretical, the concrete to the speculative or conjectural. Thus our concern is with method as well as concepts.
Scholars of history, philosophy, literature, and political science have studied the significance of materialism for the various strains of thought contesting with each other to structure modern conceptions of sensibility, sociability, ethics, and aesthetics. Bringing together literary scholars with historians of art, science, medicine, law, and philosophy, our series of conferences will address the varieties of eighteenth-century materialism at this interdisciplinary juncture. Topics will include bodies and ideas, the life of fictional creations and apparitions, pre- and post-mortem dissections, public executions, inspiration, material manifestations of immaterial forces, sensory perception, and representation. Otherwise construed, our topic might be framed as an interdisciplinary investigation of life: what distinguishes the organic and how it functions in the social world.
Our conference on life will examine such issues as inheritance, or the ability of life to transmit its attributes forward in time; the properties of living matter; vital fluids and forces and their relationship to social models of circulation; the process of sustaining life (hygiene, food); the capacity of matter to think; and the material basis of sensibility. Our conference on death continues this investigation, defining life by its cessation, and by its transmission across time. How, for example, did materialist notions of the corporeal self affect religious conceptions of identity and afterlife? What do popular and professional attitudes toward anatomy tell us about the perceived relationship of the body to the soul, or the possibility of bodily resurrection? How do juridical definitions of the body, particularly in relation to punishment, inform the understanding of death during this period? How did eighteenth-century culture imagine the relationship of the living to the illustrious dead in the service of various forms of community? What forms do relics take in the eighteenth century? We will thus consider the inextricable questions of life and death from a variety of perspectives at the junction of religious, scientific, popular, literary and legal representations.
Registration deadline— January 27
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
February 5 (Sunday), 2006, 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
Artemis Quartet
Natalia Prischepenko and Heime MuNller, violins
Volker Jacobsen, viola
Eckart Runge, celloThe Artemis Quartet was formed at the Musikhochschule in Lübeck, Germany, and quickly became renowned throughout Europe. They have won numerous awards, including the 1995 German Music Competition, the Munich Competition in 1996, and the Borciani Competition in 1997. The Artemis has appeared in such major venues as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Salzburg Festival, the Beethovenhaus in Bonn and Wigmore Hall in London. In 2001, the Quartet was honored with the Rheingau Music Award, and was the first quartet ever to be awarded the Music Prize of the Association of German critics. On its fourth North American tour, in the spring of 2002, the Artemis Quartet confirmed its preeminence among the world’s young string quartets, winning extraordinary praise from critics and the public across the continent from Boston to Los Angeles. The New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini declared that “the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet increasingly seems the most impressive quartet among the new generation.”
This group focuses constantly on the quality of its musicianship, enlarging and deepening their repertoire and musical knowledge during various residences. In 1999, they accepted an invitation from the Berlin Science Academy to live and work intensively for three months with luminaries from other fields such as physics, literature, art, history and mathematics. During this time, the Artemis scheduled no concerts in order to concentrate on its residency experience.
The Artemis Quartet records on the Ars Musici label, and several of their recordings have been awarded a Diapason d’Or and the magazine named the Quartet “Artists of the Year 2002.” The Quartet is featured in Bruno Monsaingeon’s 2001 film Strings Attached, and on the sound track of the movie Death and the Maiden.
— P R O G R A M —
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Quartet in B-flat Major, K. 589Béla Bartók
Quartet No. 4
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Franz Schubert
Quartet in A Minor, D. 804
— R E C E P T I O N —
This concert is made possible by the generous support of The Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles.
The series Chamber Music at the Clark is sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Reservation lottery submission deadline: January 9, 2006
Admission: $20 per personReservation form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
March 4th (Saturday), 2:00 p.m.
The Ninth Annual Stephen A. Kanter Lecture
on California Fine PrintingEvery Force Evolves a Form: Prints, Books & Collaboration
a lecture by Sandra and Harry Reese
— A reception will follow the lecture —
Admission: Free of charge.
Reservations: R.S.V.P. to 323-735-7605.Seating is limited.
This program is made possible by the generous support of Dr. Stephen A. Kanter
March 10-11, 2006Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views
of Conception, Life and Death
Part 3 — DeathDirected by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall, UCLA
In the wake of Descartes, many writers and readers in the eighteenth century worried about how to think about matter, and the potential of matter to move, organize itself, respond to outside influences, and eventually decompose. We propose to look at the many ways of theorizing about and experimenting with matter in this period, with particular attention to life as a subject for analysis, speculation, and portrayal (literary and pictorial). Extending our approach well beyond the life sciences, we will structure our inquiries around three different kinds of moments—conception, life, and death—and conclude with a conference on the indeterminate borders between them. We aim to situate the history of materialism within a larger history of ideas, but also in a range of literary, cultural, and scientific practices. This points us toward consideration of the relation of the body to the mind, the brain to the soul, the physical to the abstract, the empirical/experimental to the theoretical, the concrete to the speculative or conjectural. Thus our concern is with method as well as concepts.
Scholars of history, philosophy, literature, and political science have studied the significance of materialism for the various strains of thought contesting with each other to structure modern conceptions of sensibility, sociability, ethics, and aesthetics. Bringing together literary scholars with historians of art, science, medicine, law, and philosophy, our series of conferences will address the varieties of eighteenth-century materialism at this interdisciplinary juncture. Topics will include bodies and ideas, the life of fictional creations and apparitions, pre- and post-mortem dissections, public executions, inspiration, material manifestations of immaterial forces, sensory perception, and representation. Otherwise construed, our topic might be framed as an interdisciplinary investigation of life: what distinguishes the organic and how it functions in the social world.
Our conference on life will examine such issues as inheritance, or the ability of life to transmit its attributes forward in time; the properties of living matter; vital fluids and forces and their relationship to social models of circulation; the process of sustaining life (hygiene, food); the capacity of matter to think; and the material basis of sensibility. Our conference on death continues this investigation, defining life by its cessation, and by its transmission across time. How, for example, did materialist notions of the corporeal self affect religious conceptions of identity and afterlife? What do popular and professional attitudes toward anatomy tell us about the perceived relationship of the body to the soul, or the possibility of bodily resurrection? How do juridical definitions of the body, particularly in relation to punishment, inform the understanding of death during this period? How did eighteenth-century culture imagine the relationship of the living to the illustrious dead in the service of various forms of community? What forms do relics take in the eighteenth century? We will thus consider the inextricable questions of life and death from a variety of perspectives at the junction of religious, scientific, popular, literary and legal representations.
Registration deadline— March 3
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
March 18, 2006"Deep Like the Rivers": African-American Poets of Los Angeles
A program in the series “Poetry Afternoons at the Clark”
Arranged by Bruce Whiteman and Estelle Gershgoren NovakAlthough the Los Angeles River is more of a dusty arroyo than a flowing river almost all year round, the same cannot be said for poetry in Los Angeles. The waters of African American poetry are deep and have managed to fertilize much of the country from the South, to the East, and to our far West. And here in Los Angeles we have absorbed many exciting new African American poets as well as established older ones and their language has come to change the way in which we look at, taste and talk about our city and our world.
Among the readers featured in this program will be:
Marvis Hughes
Douglas Kearney (Fear, some, 2006)
Teka-Lark Lo
and Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002)Reception to follow program.
Registration deadline— March 10
Registration fees— $5
Please be aware that space at the Clark is limited and that registration closes when capacity is reached. No confirmation will be sent, but we will contact you if we receive your registration should we reach capacity.
Click here for a printable registration form.
April 2 (Sunday), 2006, 2:00 p.m.— Chamber Music at the Clark —
Pavel Haas Quartet
Veronika Jaruskova, violin
Katerina Gemrotova, violin
Pavel Nikl, viola
Peter Jarusek, celloThe Prague-based Pavel Haas Quartet captured the attention of the music world in 2005 with first prize wins in the string quartet competitions of the Prague Spring Festival and the International Borciani String Quartet Competition. As Borciani winner, the Quartet will present 40 concerts on tours of Europe, Japan and North America during the 2005-2006 season, performing in such cities as Brussels, Vienna, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Rome, Milan, Tokyo, Washington and Los Angeles. The Quartet has recently appeared at Wigmore Hall in London with the Skampa Quartet and at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence.
The Pavel Haas Quartet has studied with some of the most important figures of the string quartet world, beginning at the prestigious Accademia di Musica della Quartetto in Florence, where they were taught by such eminent musicians as Piero Farulli (Quartetto Italiano), Norbert Brainin (Amadeus Quartet), Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet), Valentin Berlinski (Borodin Quartet) and Christophe Coin (Quatuor Mosaiques). Currently, the Quartet studies with Professor Milan Skampa, violist of the renowned Smetana Quartet, and with Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet) in Basel.
— P R O G R A M —
Bedřich Smetana
Quartet No. 2 in D MinorPavel Haas
Quartet No. 2, Op. 7, "from the Monkey Mountains"
— I N T E R M I S S I O N —
Leoš Janáček
Quartet No. 2, "Intimate Letters"
— R E C E P T I O N —
The series Chamber Music at the Clark is sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Reservation lottery submission deadline: March 6, 2006
Admission: $20 per personReservation form.
For an explanation of the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please see Music Programs, 2005–06.
May 12-13, 2006Courts and Scientific Exchange in the Long Seventeenth Century
Malcolm Smuts, (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Geoffrey Symcox (UCLA)Recent scholarship has demonstrated the importance of seventeenth century courts in the history of what we now call the scientific revolution. We propose to build on this work though a conference examining how investigations of the natural world were shaped by one of the most striking features of baroque court societies, namely their highly cosmopolitan character. European courts were densely interconnected to each other and to satellite environments in their own dominions through bonds forged by dynastic marriages, diplomacy, aristocratic tourism, and intense competition for cultural prestige. The resulting networks facilitated movements of natural philosophers from one court to another, while also spreading ideas, information, and cultural fashions that impinged on natural philosophy. The growth of overseas empires simultaneously led to significant contacts with Asia and the Americas, allowing some courts to gather observations and natural specimens on a truly global scale. By bringing together leading scholars who specialize on different regions and different aspects of the history of science, this conference hopes to initiate a more focused conversation on the subject of how the international communication centered on baroque courts shaped the development of new approaches to the study and representation of the natural world.
Registration deadline— May 5
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
May 19-20, 2006Vital Matters, Part 4- Borders of the Animate
Directed by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall, UCLAIn the wake of Descartes, many writers and readers in the eighteenth century worried about how to think about matter, and the potential of matter to move, organize itself, respond to outside influences, and eventually decompose. We propose to look at the many ways of theorizing about and experimenting with matter in this period, with particular attention to life as a subject for analysis, speculation, and portrayal (literary and pictorial). Extending our approach well beyond the life sciences, we will structure our inquiries around three different kinds of moments--conception, life, and death—and conclude with a conference on the indeterminate borders between them. We aim to situate the history of materialism within a larger history of ideas, but also in a range of literary, cultural, and scientific practices. This points us toward consideration of the relation of the body to the mind, the brain to the soul, the physical to the abstract, the empirical/experimental to the theoretical, the concrete to the speculative or conjectural. Thus our concern is with method as well as concepts.
Scholars of history, philosophy, literature, and political science have studied the significance of materialism for the various strains of thought contesting with each other to structure modern conceptions of sensibility, sociability, ethics, and aesthetics. Bringing together literary scholars with historians of art, science, medicine, law, and philosophy, our series of conferences will address the varieties of eighteenth-century materialism at this interdisciplinary juncture. Topics will include bodies and ideas, the life of fictional creations and apparitions, pre- and post-mortem dissections, public executions, inspiration, material manifestations of immaterial forces, sensory perception, and representation. Otherwise construed, our topic might be framed as an interdisciplinary investigation of life: what distinguishes the organic and how it functions in the social world.
The final conference in the series, Borders of the Animate, will continue our interdisciplinary examination of these issues. Papers will address various eighteenth-century preoccupations with the vexed boundary between life and death, animate and inanimate. Automata and ghosts populate this world, in the era that gave birth to the uncanny, along with states of marginal consciousness. How do writers imagine inert matter becoming animated, or how do immaterial entities take on the qualities of life? How does literature bring characters to life? How does the era that defined the self by what it owns invest life in things? How do poems animate their authors, their subjects, and their readers? These and other questions will animate our discussions.
Registration deadline— May 12
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form. Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
June 11-12, 2006The Legacies of Richard Popkin
Sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; the UCLA Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies; the UCLA Division of Humanities – Office of the Dean; the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; the UCLA Department of Philosophy; the UCLA Department of History; and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studiesa conference organized by Jeremy Popkin, University of Kentucky and Peter H. Reill, UCLA
Richard H. Popkin (1923-2005) had a long association with the Clark Library. He was Clark Professor in 1981-82 and 1997-98 and helped organize numerous lectures and conferences at the Clark Library. He and Juliet Popkin, his wife, have supported the annual Richard H. and Juliet G. Popkin Lecture in Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy since 1999. This conference will seek to assess the legacies of the late Richard H. Popkin's work in the many fields he contributed to and helped to form: the history of philosophy and particularly the history of skepticism; Jewish studies and especially the history of Jewish-Christian interactions; the intersections of philosophical and religious thought; and the impact of millenarism.
Registration deadline— June 5
Registration fees—UC faculty & staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;* others: $30.
*Students should enclose a photocopy of their current ID with the registration form.
Fees are not refundable. Lunch and other refreshments are provided.Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration form.
Unless otherwise noted,
all academic and public programs will be held
at the Clark Library, 2520 Cimarron Street,
in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.Click here for directions to the Clark.
Printed publicity and program registration forms
will be mailed to subscribers at the beginning of fall, winter, and spring terms.
Inquiries should be addressed to the
Center office at 310 Royce Hall, UCLA
Phone: 310-206-8552; E-mail: c1718cs@humnet.ucla.eduReturn to the top of this page.
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