The term baroque, initially used to characterize a late-sixteenth-century Italian art style, has come to designate (not without controversy) a cluster of tensions in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century European culture. These include an enthusiasm for spectacular means of irresistible persuasion (in religion, politics, or literature) shadowed by suspicions about the pervasiveness of illusion or secrecy and undermined by the critical consciousness fostered by print culture; an insistence on divine transcendence haunted by a sense of God's withdrawal from the world and the fragmentation of Christendom; the consolidation of state power facilitated by the analytical methods of the new science but contested by the communication networks of an international republic of letters and the gradual spread of literacy; and the neo-Stoic ideal of the self-sufficient individual opposed to the disenchanted model of the supple and sociable courtier.

By focusing on the issue of authority-including the forms of cultural agency and influence associated with the modern idea of authorship as it developed in the period-the interdisciplinary program will explore the usefulness of baroque categories in reaching an integrated understanding of a crucial moment in early modern culture.

The year 2000 marks the tercentenary of the death of John Dryden (1631-1700). To commemorate this important poet, the Center and the Clark will present a two-part conference, arranged by Maximillian Novak, English, UCLA, and Jayne Lewis, English, UCLA, and a concert, arranged by Elisabeth LeGuin, Musicology, UCLA. 

Limited seating at the Clark make advance registration necessary. Registration fees cover the cost of lunches and refreshments and, where applicable, the distribution of advance copies of papers. Registration fees, deadlines, and program details will be added to this page as they become available. Program brochures and registration forms are mailed to subscribers about a month before each event.

The theme of this session is the location of the subject within various fields of vision, as defined by developments in astronomy and other sciences, in architecture and the theatrical arts; by travel; and by the display of knowledge in print form. The title is meant to indicate an important tension we may associate with the idea of the baroque. This is the relationship between the reading of space, in which discovery is directed by rules of measurement, and the creation of a space for reading, which allows individuals to move in unanticipated directions as they explore their place in an expanding world.

Papers will be precirculated to participants and to registrants.

Registration deadline: 22 September.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

Click to view the program schedule.

David Sorkin has published extensively on the Haskalah, the Enlightenment movement in Jewish thought and theology of the late eighteenth century. His first book, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), won the Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior award for the best book in Jewish history. His Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) has been translated into French and German. His latest book, published this year, is The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought. Professor Sorkin is now working on a study of the relationship between religion and the European Enlightenment.

Attendance is free of charge, but advance registration is required.
Registration deadline: 7 October

This program is made possible by the generous support of Richard H. and Juliet G. Popkin.

Sir Isaac Newton's preeminence in the history of science remains fixed, yet the picture we have of him has been changing rapidly, as scholars have increasingly taken cognizance of those aspects of Newton that have lain hidden in his unpublished manuscripts. At the dawn of the new millennium we find ourselves poised to launch the greatest revolution yet in Newton studies, as an international team of scholars is being assembled to publish all of Newton's widely scattered unpublished papers. The purpose of this Clark conference on Newton is to review the current state of scholarship and to prepare the ground for the revolution in Newton studies that the publication of his manuscripts will bring about. Several of the proposed speakers are eminent scholars connected with the Newton papers project. All of the speakers have been selected because of their knowledge of the state of Newtonian scholarship and for their expertise on this seminal figure who embodies so many of the paradoxical patterns of the Enlightenment.

Registration deadline: 13 October.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

Click here to view program schedule

The year 2000 marks the tercentenary of Dryden's death, and thus potentially the sealing of his status as a poet of old; both our programs, though, are intended as testaments to his perpetual newness. Indeed, we plan to conjure a poet with extraordinary powers of self-renewal-one of the happier corollaries, perhaps, of an imagination forged at a radically contradictory historical moment, or of a poetic voice both mixed and vigorous, authoritative and equivocal. In any case, we take as a compliment Samuel Johnson's verdict that Dryden was "always another and the same," and hope to bring together scholars whose papers, collectively, will show just how many different Drydens were at work between 1660 and 1700. To explore the innovative Dryden from recent critical perspectives is to chart new directions in Dryden studies. To this end, we will devote one program (The New Dryden: Poetry, Politics, and Society) to Dryden's relationship to the social and political emergencies of post-Commonwealth, late Stuart, and Williamite politics and society. Our second program ("An Old Age is Out": The New Dryden and the Arts of the Restoration, December 1-2) will place Dryden at the center of various cultural transformations, particularly in the realms of art and music. Treating the poet as shaper, gauge, and artifact of a society caught between old monarchy and new empire, ancient models and modern modalities, will allow us to celebrate his exceptional relevance to our own life on the cusp of epochs. For, as Dryden's Secular Masque of 1700 observes, for us, too, "an old Age is out," and, as true lovers of Dryden, we embrace a "time to begin a new."

Registration deadline: 20 October.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

This one-day symposium, held on the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death, will provide the occasion for scholars to address the question of how Wilde has been remembered---biographically, critically, and historically-during the past hundred years.

Registration deadline: 22 November.
Registration fees: $10 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $20 for others.

Click here to view details

This conference will place Dryden at the center of various cultural transformations, particularly in the realms of art and music. Treating the poet as both shaper, gauge, and artifact of a society caught between old monarchy and new empire, ancient models and modern modalities, will allow us to celebrate his exceptional relevance to our own life on the cusp of epochs. For, as Dryden's Secular Masque of 1700 observes, for us too "an old Age is out," and as true lovers of Dryden we embrace a "time to begin a new." (Please see also the discussion at October 27-28, the date of the first conference.)

Registration deadline: 22 November.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

This concert is part of this year's commemorative series of programs on John Dryden.

In a program dedicated to musical works composed to texts by John Dryden, soloists, chorus, and orchestra from the UCLA musicology and music departments will perform works of Henry Purcell and Louis Grabu under the direction of the distinguished scholar and conductor Philip Brett.

Click here for program details and for information about other music programs offered throughout the year by the Center and the Clark.

Return to the top of this page. 

---

The afternoon will be dedicated to readings of and commentary on some of the poetry of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries, including Lady Francesca Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Amy Levy, Lionel Johnson, and others.

Reservations deadline: February 2
Admission: $5

Click here to view the complete program.

This session focuses on the ways religious and political relationships (and their domestic and gender implications) are imagined, delimited, and controlled in an early modern Europe marked by the division of Christendom into rival confessions and the consolidation of states as unifying centers of power. Baroque forms of expression, whether in piety, art, or representations of personal or political authority, are often defined in terms of a tension between ostentation and concealment, and between fusion and fragmentation. We will explore the continuing relevance of such categories in the light of new approaches to the cultural history of the period.

Papers will be precirculated to participants and to registrants.

Registration deadline: February 9
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

Click here to view a detailed program and a registration form.

What does repetition—at once the act and instance of repeating—indicate about constructions of agency and authority during the long eighteenth century in Euro-American cultures? Repetition is often thought of as a tedious or reassuring sameness with some measure of continuity, especially when we rely on a traditional Freudian account of the repetition compulsion or on post-modern explorations of the radical alienability of a repeated element from its original. But these models cannot adequately explain the centrality and ambiguity of ritual, routine, and habit in many aspects of early modern British, American, and Continental cultures.

In early modern contexts, there emerged a number of alternate, competing, or even incongruous perspectives on repetition’s value. Both an imperative and an increasingly devalued strategy in early modern life, repetition could be understood as an attempt to impose continuity on incongruities, or as an effort to come to terms with difference located within sameness. Imitation in a Neoclassical context was simultaneously recapitulation and creation. While a relatively new scientific method derived its authority from the replicability of experiments, the proof of creative authority shifted from effective imitation or translation of the past to the production of an ostensible original. The issue of repetition also in part provoked the ancient and modern controversy: should a nation reiterate another era or move ahead into a modernity that self-consciously separates itself from a past? In another emergent arena, national identities can be seen as formulated through repetition to become regime, either at institutionalized levels or as the incorporation of individual values that are attributed to national character and habit.

This conference seeks not only to address contested meanings given to repetition in early modern Euro-American cultures, but also to explore possible negotiations between early modern practices and twentieth-century accounts of the institutions of repetition.

Registration deadline: February 23.
Registration fees:  $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

Click here to view a detailed program and a registration form.

The Women’s Graphic Center was established in 1973 under the direction of the designer Sheila de Bretteville, one of the founders, with artist Judy Chicago and art historian Arlene Raven, of the Woman’s Building of Los Angeles, a public center for women’s culture modeled on the Women’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which had housed artworks and handicrafts by women around the world. The Los Angeles Graphic Center operated through the 1980s. Focusing on work being done by women printers and artists, it provided access to silkscreen, letterpress, offset, and photography equipment; offered classes in graphic and book design, printing, and self-publishing; and mounted exhibitions and lectures. Susan King will discuss her involvement with this Center.

Reservations deadline: March 9.
Admission: Free of charge.

This conference brings together musicology and music performance beneath the encompassing umbrella of oratory, as it was understood to apply to music by eighteenth-century listeners, performer-composers, music theorists and critics alike. A focal point will be the chamber music-especially the solo and accompanied keyboard sonatas-of Joseph Haydn, described by his contemporaries as "a clever orator" or "the Shakespeare of music."

It has become fairly commonplace for latter-day musicians and music historians to refer to music in terms of rhetoric, while merely meaning that it is speechlike in conception or execution. This looseness evades some difficult questions that arise around the association of music and rhetoric, while it fails to do justice to the historical richness of that association. Through the interdisciplinary scope of this conference, we hope to shed new light upon the relations between the two arts, by addressing some of those difficult questions-if rhetoric is the art of persuasion, of what is the listener of music being persuaded? who "speaks" in chamber music: are musicians having a conversation, or is the composer, as one master-orator, "speaking" to or through the musicians? can music ever be said to function semantically, or is this a chimera?-and addressing them with especial reference to the historical context of Haydn's day, in which rhetorical theory and practice were central to basic education, and praise of a composer as a "clever orator" was neither lightly nor loosely applied.

Through the incorporation of performances of Haydn's music into the conference, discussion of the works performed, and the resultant engagement of conference participants in issues of "audience performance practice," we hope to begin a process of rebuilding an eighteenth-century understanding of the musical work as one integrated rhetorical process, from invention to delivery, incorporating issues such as expression, notation, persona, and a range of possible relationships among composers, performers, and listeners. 

Registration deadline: April 13.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

"The true rule [of poetry] is to be able to break all rules at the right time and place, adapting oneself to current customs and to the taste of one's age." This sentence by Giambattista Marino defines in a few words the new principles of Baroque aesthetics: its prevalent anticlassical thrust, and its reliance upon the element of surprise and shock to bring aesthetic pleasure to the reader. The session will explore this "poetics of wonder," and the different manner in which it was received along national-linguistic lines.

Papers will be precirculated to participants and to registrants.

Registration deadline: April 20.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.

During a special exhibition of recent acquisitions, guests will have an opportunity to buy rare books for the Clark Libray. The "Afternoon of Acquisitions" is an annual fund raising event arranged with the help of the Center/Clark's Director's Advisory Council. Additional information about this year's program is forthcoming.

By invitation.

An expert artist on early pianos and their predecessors, the harpsichords and clavichords, Tom Beghin, Assistant Professor in UCLA’s music department, is presenting  a fascinating series of concerts devoted to Franz Josef Haydn's keyboard sonatas performed on period instruments. For any lover of eighteenth-century keyboard music, the experience of hearing Haydn's masterpieces played on the instruments for which they were composed is not to be missed. 
In the first program of the cycle, and his first appearance at the Clark, last June, Mr. Beghin performed the "Auenbrugger Sonatas" (1780) on a beautiful replica of an Anton Walter fortepiano, an instrument whose acoustics invite performers to highlight the interior architecture of compositions: phrase structures, articulation patterns, and characteristic rhetorical gestures become transparent, allowing audiences to savor the finer points of Haydn's music.

In the cycle's fifth program, the second at the Clark, Mr. Beghin will play the sonatas referred to by Haydn in his own catalogue as “6 Sonaten von Anno 776” (Hob.xvi:27–32). Finished by 1776 and published in 1778, these were Haydn’s second set of published sonatas, after the six dedicated to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (1773) and before those dedicated to the sisters von Auenbrugger. With a content ranging from comical to serious, carefree to troubled, simple to complex, the “Anno 776” compositions satisfied perfectly the keen musical appetites of the new and growing market of amateur players. Tom Beghin will perform these wonderfully varied and entertaining sonatas alternately on the “old” harpsichord and the “new” fortepiano. 

As with all music programs, reservations will be awarded on the basis of a mail-in lottery.
The reservations-by-lottery deadline: April 27.
Admission: $15.

The musician played a special role in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a cultural entrepreneur, indeed as an opportunist. Success in that profession came through social skills by which the musician identified and exploited opportunities to play music, put it on, or teach it. That could be done through a wide variety of individual or institutional patronage, often on an itinerant basis, and took factional or ideological meaning in some contexts. The entrepreneurism of musical life added a remarkable individualism and personal mobility to a society known chiefly as corporatist, and it established an important kind of petty capitalism.

From the late eighteenth century on musicians turned these skills to more large-scale and independent ends. Opportunist musicians shifted from finding positions in a few elite families to building new publics within concert life. Some attempted to alter the nature of authority in musical life whereby the composer became a self-defining architect of the whole nature of the music and its performance. But the musicians who did this began with and then transformed traditional practices of musical entrepreneurship from the old regime. Musicians found opportunities to give their art prominent new public roles thanks to their forebears' tradition of self-aggrandizement.

The participants-musicologists and historians-will consider the practices and the social assumptions through which musicians as individuals were able to take advantage of patrons, publics, and markets. 

Registration deadline: May 25.
Registration fees: To be announced.

Click here to view a detailed program

British freemasonry first flourished in the space opened by the Revolution Settlement of 1689. Within a few decades the lodges had migrated onto the Continent, and the specifically British cultural forms exported—frequent elections, an ideology of equality and merit, an emphasis on internal order and self-governance—made the lodges suspect to Continental authorities, particularly in absolutist countries. The Papal condemnation of 1738 enhanced the suspicion, and, in Catholic Europe, spies and police watched the earliest lodges closely. In most places, however, Masonic lodges had become commonplace by 1750 and counted perhaps as many as 50,000 men and 1,000 women as members. In Catholic Europe especially, in Naples and Venice, for example, the lodges were hotbeds of enlightened conversation. Yet hostile commentators as early as mid-century laid emphasis upon conspiracy or hinted at “sodomy” and immorality within the lodges. The trickle of anti-Masonic literature from mid-century became a torrent in France by the autumn of 1789. From then onwards finding the nature of freemasonry—separating the myths about the lodges and their propensities from the reality—becomes immensely difficult, particularly in Catholic countries that were late to shed absolutist forms of government and to secularize. The conference will focus on the various eighteenth-century contexts within which European freemasonry developed. 

Papers will be precirculated to participants and to registrants.

Registration deadline: May 25.
Registration fees: $15 for UC faculty & staff; free of charge to students; $25 for others.