The next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2024-2025 series will take place virtually on Friday, February 7th, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. (EST) via Zoom. Dr. Douglas Boyce and Dr. Claire Goldstein will deliver a talk titled “Comets and Music In the Sun King's Cosmos, a history.”

 

Link to Dr. Claire Goldstein's book: In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France

 

Zoom link:   https://wcupa.zoom.us/j/95604458865?pwd=PwZ5XVRVrpfEzjzDVV5gzqufHAk7s9.1

 

 

Claire Goldstein, Professor of French at the University of California, Davis, examines the cultural dynamics of Louis XIV's court, where the monarch sought to portray himself as the central force organizing all aspects of society. Her research focuses on how public interest in comets appearing in 1664-5 and 1680-81 disrupted this carefully constructed royal narrative.

The intersection of Goldstein's work with music emerged through her friendship with composer Boyce, formed during their time at UPenn's material culture seminar. Goldstein's inquiry about a lute composition by Jacques Galot led to extensive discussions about cultural representation and astronomical events as agents of social change. This scholarly dialogue inspired Boyce's musical piece 'La Comète,' which explores themes of disruption and alternative cultural narratives, using Galot's composition as a source for musical material, and an aesthetic vinculum between academic and artistic discourses.  The discussion will consider the social and political implications the unexpected (celestial and otherwise), and the fortuitous becoming of such events.

 

 

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Medieval and Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.  His approach is deeply historical and broadly philosophical.  This approach and the works themselves connect to many aspects of the scholarship in the humanities, including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy. His music has been described as "vastly stimulating on all levels, whether intellectual or emotional" (Colin Clarke, Fanfare), "seriously engaging and masterfully developed"  (Allan J. Cronin, New Music Buff) and as having " a natural feel for dramatic, linear flow, and a sense of daring and imagination." (Peter Burwasser, Fanfare).  Douglas Boyce serves as Professor of Music at George Washington University and holds a BA in music and Physics from Williams College (1992), an MM in composition from the University of Oregon (1996), and a PhD in Composition from the University of Pennsylvania (2000). He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He is a composer-in-residence of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective active in the New York region (www.counterinduction.com). His works have been published by New Dynamic Records, Capstone Records, the Society of Composers, Inc., and New Focus Recordings.

Claire Goldstein joined the UC Davis faculty in 2013. She was previously a faculty member in the Department of French and Italian at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Professor Goldstein’s research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings.  Professor Goldstein's forthcoming book (Northwestern UP, Rethinking the Early Modern, February 2025), In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France, is a study of how unusually bright comets that appeared in 1664-65 and 1680-81 appeared not only in the sky but also in ballets and theater, letters and early journalism, architecture and institutions, theology and literary style. She studies how comets -- considered at the time to be chaotic and without discernible form or pattern -- organized curiosity, scrutiny, resistance and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation; and also crystalized alternative—non-official, sometimes contestatory— networks in which information, bodies, and texts circulated against the centralizing current of Louis XIV's France, which sought to dictate the shape, availability, and dissemination of knowledge.

 

 

Please join us for Drs. Boyce and Goldstein's talk and discussion afterwards. 

  

For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website athttp://wagpcs.wordpress.com/, or contact Sabrina Baron and Eleanor Shevlin at their email addresses above.

 

For their encouragement and support, the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies would like to thank Stephanie Stillo, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress and Lessing J. Rosenwald Curator, and other Library of Congress staff including Michael North, Head, Reference and Reader Services, Rare Book and Special Collections, and Eric Frazier, Reference Librarian Rare Book and Special Collections. We are also indebted to John Y. Cole,  retired Library of Congress Historian and founder of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and Mark Dimunation, the now retired Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress who have supported WAGPCS over the years.