Session 1

Meet the Imani Winds—the path-breaking, Grammy-nominating woodwind quintet recently appointed as the Don Michael Randel Ensemble in Residence at the University of Chicago. This dynamic chamber ensemble, known for its superb musicianship, culturally poignant programming, and inspirational outreach programs, presents an informal program of standard woodwind quintet repertoire and engaging orchestral transcriptions, capped by an interactive Q&A session with the audience.  

Vu Tran’s 2015 literary crime novel, Dragonfish, tells the story of a white American police officer searching for his Vietnamese ex-wife in the gambling dens of Las Vegas and amid the Vietnamese-American gangsters who’ve brought him there. Tran will read from Dragonfish and discuss how he used the conventions of noir fiction to tell a deeper story about the refugee experience and the shadow it casts over the lives of the Vietnamese-Americans in his novel.

A few years ago the music psychologist Diana Deutsch circulated an astounding recording in which everyday speech was magically transformed into music. Her recording prompts the first question I want to explore: what makes words change into music? And finally, using my research on relationships between words and music in songs—how does music change how we hear and understand words?

The loss of a credit card or your PIN code falling in the hands of hackers are concerns that people in the ancient Middle East some 3500 years ago could relate to. For them their personal seal was like a PIN: they used it to sign important records and transactions and those seals were traceable to them and them only. What was hacking like then and what could one do against it? This talk presents some relevant Hittite material from ancient Anatolia (nowadays Turkey) between 1500 and 1200 BC.

Nakata Hideo's horror film Ringu (1998) with its abundant allusions to the memories of atom bombings offers a contemporary example of the Japanese film genre called hibakusha cinema (films about the victims of the atom bomb). In the context of Fukushima, anti-nuclear activism, and President Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima, Ringu’s atomic iconography acquires a historical and political dimension that harks back to the history of nuclear physics on the University of Chicago campus.

The first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contains a text with passages that match medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng wu程寤, or Awakening at Cheng, which in turn is said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou shu逸周書, or Leftover Zhou Documents. The passages concern one of Chinese literature’s earliest interpretations of a dream, and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their sections on dreams.