Enfilade

Johan Zoffany, The Gore Family with George, 3rd Earl Cowper, ca. 1775, oil on canvas, 31 × 39 inches
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.87)

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From the conference website:

The Salon and the Senses in the Long 18th Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Online, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 4–5 March 2021

The conference The Salon and the Senses in the Long 18th Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, seeks to join the intellectual heritage of the salons with their multidisciplinary, multisensory natures. We will explore the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile aspects of the salon, considering the arts and sensory pleasures of the salon alongside the verbal arts—the poetry, literature, theater, and conversation—that were cultivated there.

Salons of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries knew no disciplinary boundaries. More than other institutions of the age, salons offered their habitués opportunities to engage with a wide range of social, cultural, artistic, literary, and verbal practices. A multidisciplinary approach requires that we—like salon hostesses and guests before us—open our minds across modern intellectual boundaries and reanimate the embodied practices of the institution. By bringing together scholars from numerous fields, we hope to shed new light on salons in all of their complexity. Above all, we seek to understand the multi-sensory nature of the salon: its sights, sounds, tastes, and smells; its conversations, texts, and subtexts.

4  M A R C H  2 0 2 1

1.00  Session 1: Welcome and 18th-Century Drama Workshop
• Jennifer Jones (History-SAS) and Rebecca Cypess (Music-Mason Gross) Welcome
• Christopher Cartmill (Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts), ‘The Chironomia’: Interactive workshop on 18th-century English and French dramatic practices

2.15  Session 2: The Senses of Smell, Touch, and Humor
• Iris Moon (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Open, Shut Them: A Capodimonte Snuffbox and the Sense of Touch in the Salon
• Érika Wicky (Université Lumière Lyon 2), Olfaction and the Salon: The Smell of Paint from Mansion House to Art Critique
• Marjanne Elaine Goozé (University of Georgia), A Sense of Humor and Antisemitism in the Berlin Jewish Salons, ca. 1800

4.00  Session 3: Keynote Address
• Melanie Conroy (University of Memphis), On Networking: Enlightenment-Era French Salons

7.00  Session 4: Lecture-Recital
The Raritan Players, directed by Rebecca Cypess — ‘In the Salon of Elizabeth Graeme’, a program exploring the musical practices of a salon hostess in 1760s–70s Philadelphia; played on period instrument

5  M A R C H  2 0 2 1

9.00  Session 5: Music in the Salon
• Michael Bane (Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music), Amateur Musicians and their Audiences in French Salons around 1700, or, How to Compliment a Musical Friend
• Floris Meens (Radbound University), The ‘Other’ Languages of Private Sociability: Music and Emotion in Dutch Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Salons
• Nicole Vilkner (Duquesne University), Opera prêt-à-porter: Gallope d’Onquaire and the Commercialization of Salon opéra, 1850–1870

10.45  Session 6: Music, Gender, and Politics
• Markus Rathey (Yale University), The Subversion of Gender Expectations in Bach’s Dramatic Cantatas
• Callum Blackmore (Columbia University), Hyacinthe Jadin and the Noise of Revolution: Recovering French String Quartet Aesthetics in 1790s Paris
• Lindsay Jones (University of Toronto), Mauro Giuliani and the Congress of Vienna: Musical Representations of Power and Politics

1.00  Session 7: Paris ca. 1760: How to Make a Pop-Up Salon
Concluding discussion