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Join us for a China Seminar talk on ‘A rare Ming Dynasty, Pipa in the Metropolitan Museum: In pursuit of it’s literary, historical and musical context’ with Professor Judith Zeitlin

26 January 2016 at 4pm in A18, Si Yuan Building, Jubilee Campus. The University of Nottingham.

The seminar format is:

4.00-5.00 Guest speaker

5.00-5.30 Q&A

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided on arrival.

Title: A rare Ming Dynasty, Pipa in the Metropolitan Museum: In pursuit of it’s literary, historical and musical context

Abstract: One of the treasures of the musical instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a richly decorated pipa (a pear-shaped Chinese lute), made of wood, ivory, and bone, and thought to date from the late Ming (ca 1574-1644). The back of this instrument is honeycombed with some 120 ivory plaques carved with auspicious pictorial motifs, such as immortals, animals, and flowers. The pegbox terminates in a carved wooden bat or butterfly. On the front of the instrument are inset a small ivory spider and bird; an ivory-plated string holder with an operatic scene is glued to the wooden belly; another ivory plaque pictures a boy and a man holding a fish. The wooden belly is worn and has scratches around the string holder, suggesting that despite its lavish ornamentation, the pipa had been played in the past and was not merely for display.

What was this instrument? Where might it have been fashioned and who could have played it? What does its decorative program mean and why was it ornamented so lavishly? And above all what can this sort of highly wrought luxury object tell us about the representation and social practice of music in early modern China?

My talk attempts to situate this instrument within the literary, historical, and cultural context of early modern music, theater, and decorative objects. To interpret the cultural meanings of this enigmatic object, I will take two approaches: intrinsic and extrinsic. By intrinsic, I mean studying the decorative program, material, and design of the object itself; by extrinsic, I mean studying how such an instrument might have been treated and given meaning by others in the early modern period. In this latter pursuit, I focus on the famous playwright Kong Shangren (1648-1718), who was a keen collector of antique musical instruments and who wrote his first play on an antique instrument he owned. The final part of the talk will introduce a collaborative project undertaken with composer Yao Chen and pipa virtuoso Lan Weiwei on imagining the sounds of the early modern pipa in twenty-first century music.

Bio of Speaker: Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her work combines literary history of the Ming-Qing period (16^th-19^th centuries) with other disciplines, particularly music and performance, visual and material culture, as well as gender studies, medicine and film. Her many publications on Chinese fiction and drama include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and four co-edited works: Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (2014), “Chinese Opera Film,” a special issue of The Opera Quarterly (2010), Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), and Writing and Materiality in China (2003). She is currently on leave in Beijing and Oxford writing a book on the culture of musical entertainment in early modern China.

The seminars are free and open to the public unless otherwise stated. Admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Best wishes

Liz Bond

The University of Nottingham

School of Contemporary Chinese Studies

Room A02, Si Yuan building

Jubilee Campus

Nottingham

NG8 1BB

011582 32114