Notre Dame: The Soul of Medieval Paris -- Lecture Series with Musical Performances
Herbst Theatre at the San Francisco War Memorial Building (401 Van Ness Ave San Francisco, CA 94102)
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The last date listed for Notre Dame: The Soul of Medieval Paris was Saturday November 5, 2011 / 10:00am-4:00pm.
1 Goldstar Member Review
Goldstar Member
Found the talks on Sat. very interesting. The speakers were well informed.Written on Nov 07 2011
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More Information About Notre Dame: The Soul of Medieval Paris
Website
http://www.humanitieswest.org/currentNotre.html
Description
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).
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.
Saturday, November 5, 2011, 10:00 am to noon and 1:30 to 4:00 pm
The Gothic Enterprise: Cathedral Building in Europe, 1137-1550
Robert A. Scott (Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford)
Notre Dame de Paris is one of Europe's greatest cathedrals, and we are awestruck and humbled by its magnificence. But it is equally astonishing to realize that hundreds of other cathedrals and great churches were being built during the same period all over Europe, together comprising one of the architectural and social achievements of Western culture. Gothic Cathedrals invite us to think about what inspired the audacity to build them. Why would a society that was so impoverished want to invest so much capital and effort in buildings that were physically stupendous, yet produced nothing tangible? What conception of the divine lay behind their creation? What were they for? And how did religious and secular leaders use cathedrals for their own social status and political advancement? In this lecture Scott explores the social, cultural, religious, ideological and political contexts in which Notre Dame and other cathedrals of Europe were conceived and built.
Notre Dame and the Emergence of the Medieval Retributive Cosmos
Hester Gelber (Religious Studies, Stanford)
During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, just when the Bishops of Paris were planning and erecting the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the concept of retributive justice, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked, began to dominate the western European imagination. Christ and Mary as the dispensers of justice and mercy ruled over a spatialized terrain in which their mythologized interaction in the salvation and punishment of souls set the model for the mythologized interactions of kings and queens in the earthly retributive sphere. In this retributive cosmology, justice and mercy, mediated through obedience, were the dominant virtues, virtues prominently in evidence in Gothic cathedral façades. Both bishops and kings had a vested interest in the imagery of justice and mercy, and the sculpture of Notre Dame is a nearly perfect evocation of the emergent retributive system.
Lunch Break
Performance and Lecture
Apocalypse and Debauchery: Anti-clericalism in Medieval French Music and Literature.
Multi-instrumentalist and Singer Tim Rayborn (Berkeley) explores the rise of secular culture in mid-thirteenth-century Paris and the conflicts with religious organizations that followed from it. He focuses on the arguments between the secular masters and the mendicant orders at the University of Paris, and how this debate found its way into the secular music and poetry of the time. He will present examples of this poetry and music, performed with medieval instruments, and show how anti-clericalism became an important part of medieval French artistic culture, despite the inherent dangers of angering Church authorities.
Victor Hugo and Notre-Dame de Paris
Suzanne Guerlac (French, UC Berkeley)
In French the title of Hugo's celebrated and very popular novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is simply Notre Dame de Paris, the name of the Cathedral that still sits in the heart of Paris. What happens in this act of translation? How is it that in passing from one language to another we seem to slide from the sublime, the sacred monument, to the grotesque character of Quasimodo, whose body is hideously deformed and whose spirit is quickly broken. Which one lies at the heart of the novel? In fact, they both do, one inside the other. What is the meaning of this identification between the two?
Panel Discussion with all Presenters and written questions from the Audience.