[Commlist] Warburg Institute - Times of Festival: Spring 2021

*Times of Festival* is a new online lecture series on festivals in 
Europe and beyond from the perspectives of social history, art history, 
history of music and literature, and anthropology. Convener and 
organiser: Eckart Marchand (Bilderfahrzeuge Project / Warburg Institute)

All sessions are free via zoom.

*Wednesday 20 January 2021: 5.30pm (UK time)*

*Reinhard Strohm (Oxford University): '“Laus urbium” – early musical 
compositions in praise of cities'*

Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23528 
<https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23528>

**

This paper will address the question of origins. Celebrative music was a 
dominant practice throughout the Middle Ages, both in the sacred sphere, 
where festal plainsong was always central to the liturgy, and in the 
secular, where Latin panegyric song already surfaces in the 11th-century 
/Carmina Cantabrigensia/. The polyphonic and panegyric motet addressing 
a secular subject, however, seems to arise around 1400. Several of these 
motets, which will be considered musically and textually, are of Italian 
origin and their texts praise Italian cities (Padua, Vicenza, Florence) 
rather than princely or ecclesiastical authorities; prominent composers 
such as Ciconia and Du Fay are involved; there are musical intertextual 
links between some of them, and signs of a developing author - and work 
- consciousness in music. Did Leonardo Bruni’s /Laudatio Florentinae 
urbis/ play any part in the constitution of this musical genre? The 
festal occasions for which these works may have been created, and their 
relationships with ecclesiastical music on the one hand, and political 
poetry, on the other, are also part of this inquiry.

*Wednesday 24 February 2021: 5.30pm (UK time) *

*Matteo Casini (University of Massachusetts, Boston): 'A Society on 
Show: State Processions in Renaissance Venice (1495-1600)'*

Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23571 
<https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23571>

 From the well-known Palm Sunday Procession in 1495 to the early 17th 
century, the main State processions in Venice were extraordinary feasts 
in which intense acts of religious devotion were intertwined with civic 
splendour and symbolism. Long corteges developed with hundreds of 
participants, particularly in St. Mark’s Square, and their exhibition 
lasted hours. The church and confraternities appeared with the Corpus 
Christi and “mysteries and figures” while the highest classes surrounded 
the doge in a precise hierarchy. With such an intense participation and 
schedule the main public processions were capable, as the paper will 
show, to enlighten fundamental social, religious, ceremonial and 
cultural ideals and tensions featuring the “Most Serene Republic of 
Venice” in the late Renaissance.

*Wednesday 17 March 2021: 5.30pm (UK time) *

*Susanne Kuechler (UCL): 'An Anthropological Perspective on Festival, 
Time and the Image'*

Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23572 
<https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23572>

Much of contemporary thought on the nature of the image is shaped by the 
attention directed by Aby Warburg to the image’s own temporality, one 
that is widely credited by its ‘survival’ (Didi-Huberman 1990, 2002). 
Warburg’s vision was of ‘Nachleben’ as an alternative to what he called 
a ‘panoramic view of history’ (Warburg 1999:585), comprised of 
chronologies, influences and the occasional genius. In tracing an 
image’s Nachleben Warburg thought to fashion a new methodology, one that 
is sensitive to the image’s own capabilities to extend itself in time in 
a transformational and generative manner that is conducive to 
translation. This paper will show the resonance of Warburg's 
methodological aspiration with recent theoretical work in anthropology 
on the nature of the image, and will turn to case studies from Oceanic 
art. The attention of anthropological theory to the image’s own 
propensity to unfold itself, traceable as patterns of similarity and 
difference, will be shown to enable the contemplation of complex 
sequences underpinning the distributive economies of maritime societies 
in ways that matter in localized and historically specific ways.


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