Fri.-Sat., April 14-15, 2000

YALE UNIVERSITY, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, Ct.

Organized by the Departments of Music and Italian (Prof. Ellen Rosand and Giuseppe Mazzotta).

INFO: Mauro Calcagno. Tel.: (203)777.2145. Fax: (203) 432-2983. E-mail: mauro.calcagno@yale.edu

During the Baroque, the arts in Italy manifested an especially close relationship, sharing expressive means as well as ends, and the distinctions between individual arts blurred. Theater--the very idea of which served as a unifying metaphor--articulated the separation as well as fusion of spectacle and spectator, sacred and secular. Opera, by joining music, poetry, and the visual arts, best embodied the structural permeability of boundaries typical of this period.

In challenging the traditional limits of the individual arts, Baroque culture offers an ideal ground upon which to test, today, the very idea of interdisciplinarity: To what degree are critical strategies or vocabularies developed for the analysis and interpretation of each art relevant to the criticism of the others?

This issue will provide the theme of a conference to be held on April 14-15, 2000, at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University. The meeting will feature scholars of different disciplines (music, literature, art) from Yale as well as other universities, both American and European.

Program:

FRIDAY, Apr. 14:

• 10:00-11:00: Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale), introductory remarks; Gary Tomlinson (Univ. of Pennsylvania), keynote address.

• SESSION I, 11:00-1:00 (Ellen Rosand, Yale, chair): Stale Wikshaland (Univ. of Oslo) on Monteverdi and Subjectivity, Paolo Berdini (Stanford) on Caravaggio and the Beholder.

• SESSION II, 2:00-5:00 (Christopher Wood, Yale, chair): Jonathan Unglaub (Washington Univ.) on Poussin and Opera Librettos, Paolo Fabbri (Univ.of Ferrara) on Music and Image in Opera, Federico Schneider (Yale) on Guarini and Monteverdi.

• 7:00 CONCERT (WLH, Sudler Hall, free admission).

SATURDAY, Apr. 15:

• SESSION III, 10:00-1:00 (Kristin Phillips, Yale, chair): Giovanni Pozzi (Lugano, Switzerland) on Sacred Oratory and Emblems, Mauro Calcagno (Yale) on Venetian Opera and Discourse Analysis, Irving Lavin (Princeton) TBA.

• SESSION IV, 2:00-5:00 (David Quint, Yale, Chair): Nefeli Misuraca (Yale) on Caravaggio's Aesthetics, Robert Holzer (Yale) on Monteverdi as Rhetorician, Francesco Guardiani (Univ. of Toronto) on Arts and Music in Marino.

• 5:00-6:00: DISCUSSION (Chairs: G. Mazzotta and Ellen Rosand, Yale).