讲座题目：大都会艺术博物馆的明代琵琶：走进它文学、历史和戏剧背景的重建
讲座时间：2014年9月10日15：00
讲座地点：校本部A602
主讲人：蔡九迪（Judith T. Zeitlin） 美国芝加哥大学教授
讲座内容简介：
One of the treasures of the musical instrument collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a richly decorated Ming dynasty pipa made of wood, ivory, and bone. The flat back of this slender instrument is honeycombed with some 120 ivory plaques carved with auspicious pictorial motifs, such asimmortals, animals, and flowers. The pegbox terminates in a carved wooden bat or butterfly. On the front of the instruments inset a small ivory spider, below which an ivory bird is carved in a rondel; an ivory-plated string holder with a scene from the opera Romance of the Western Chamber is glued to the wooden belly; another ivory plaque between the body and neck 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?
