The CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series
“Music and Technology of the Written Text: A New Codicology for the Middle Ages ”
November 6–7, 2009
All of the medieval music that survives today does so as written texts, and the study of these texts has traditionally been separated into two spheres of inquiry: musicological study of the music—the “Work of Art”—itself; and codicology, the study of the manuscripts that transmit these musical works. This conference, organized by Professor Elizabeth Randell Upton (Musicology, UCLA), addresses the growing awareness among musicologists as well as medievalists in other disciplines that the study of manuscripts and the study of the texts they contain can and should be integrated to a greater degree. Some of the questions to be considered are: How does the act of writing change or shape the musical or poetic texts that are written? How does the nature of the material to be copied change the procedures of scribes and book-makers? How do the desires of composers, writers, readers and patrons affect the composition of works and the writing of books? How were the activities of medieval writers, composers, performers, scribes, and readers interrelated? And how can we, as scholars today, understand both the material that is being communicated to us and the recording technologies that allow us to hear sounds first uttered centuries ago?
Support for this conference has been provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding provided by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
The thirty-second UC Celtic Studies Conference, organized by Professor Joseph Nagy (English, UCLA) and the UCLA Celtic Colloquium, will be convened at UCLA on March 4–7, 2010. Sessions will focus on all aspects of Celtic culture including language, literature, history, art and archaeology, from late antiquity until the present day. Invited guest speakers include Professor Kim McCone (Chair of Old and Middle Irish, National University of Ireland, Maynooth) and Dr. Katharine Simms (Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Trinity College Dublin). A call for papers will be sent out by email in autumn 2009. The complete conference program will be posted here in late January 2010. For more information, contact Professor Nagy at jfnagy@humnet.ucla.edu.
The CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series
“Synesthesia: Classics Beyond the Visual Paradigm”
Thursday, April 29, 2010 - Saturday, May 1, 2010
Poets, from Orpheus to Baudelaire, have long called us away from sight. But there are signs that literary scholars have grown deaf to their cries. Consider the dominant rubrics of contemporary literary analysis: theory (from theôrein, “to see”), ideology (from idein, “to see”), representation (almost always understood as a question of images). The problem is not one of etymology, but of use. One might ask, for example, why we have never seem to have gotten around to theorizing smell, or why scholars of poetry (which the ancients referred to as “song”) so seldom discuss the ideology of sound. Touch as well is often invoked by ancient poets (“To whom shall I give my new little book, its edges neatly trimmed?” begins Catullus), but outside specialized discussions of the “history of the book,” we seem barely to have begun to grapple with the implications of poetic materiality. Taste matters too: for a remarkable variety of reasons, the ancients compared poetry to “honey;” Lucretius would suggest this made it suitable to mask the bitter taste of the wormwood of truth.
What would happen if we tried to begin literary analysis not with sight, but with any (or all) of the remaining senses? At the simplest level, we would need to pay attention to metaphors like the one just cited. We would also need to treat poetry not as bodiless text but as a physical object, realized in wax, papyrus, parchment, stone, and susceptible therefore to engagement by senses other than sight. We would need to strive to listen once again to poetry, privileging—like ancient euphonist critics—sound over meaning. We would need to open our senses to meanings and pleasures not solely or simply visual.
This conference will bring together scholars of classical literature and the traditions it inspired in the Middle Ages and Renaissance who are working “across the senses” or who are exploring these often forgotten critical perspectives. A common thread in the papers and discussions presented at the conference is an implicit or declared desire to move beyond the visual paradigm.
The Ahmanson Foundation, with the support of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Dean of Humanities, has made it possible for CMRS to fund a number of conferences over the next several years on a well-planned and predictable basis. The series will be called “the CMRS Ahmanson Conferences.”
The first round of applications will be reviewed at the end of April 2007 for conferences to be held during the period from September 2007 to June 2010. Expenses to be supported by CMRS should not exceed $20,000. Applications are due in the CMRS office by Friday, April 27.
Applications should include:
A description, no longer than a thousand words, of (a) the topic of the conference; (b) the time of the conference; and (c) the expected consequences of the conference;
A list of participants, from UCLA or from elsewhere, to be invited (it is not necessary that invitations be made or accepted at the time of application);
A description, no longer than three hundred words, of how UCLA graduate students will be involved in the conference planning, implementation and follow-up.
All UCLA faculty are eligible, but preference will be given to faculty whose tenure-track appointments at UCLA are relatively recent. Preference will also be given to applications that make a strong and persuasive commitment to engaging graduate students in planning the conference, implementing the plan and following-up on it.
