Emily Wilbourne's colloquium entitled "Little Black Giovanni's Dream: Dwarves, Slaves, Infidels, and Musical Performance at the Medici Court."  will take place Friday, February 15th, 2019 at 3:30pm in Old Cabell room 107.  This event is free and open to the public.

Abstract:
The poem, "Sogno di Giovannino Moro" or "Little Black Giovanni's Dream," survives in a single manuscript copy, undated and unattributed in the Medicean archives in Florence. This paper provides a close reading of the text, arguing that the enslaved black chamber singer Gio: Buonaccorsi (fl. 1651-d.1674) was the author of the poem. The text itself, likely to have been performed to music, gives evidence of a close -knit community of dwarves, slaves, buffoons and infidels within the inner circles of the court and argues for a more sophisticated account of the multicultural and international presence of "Others" within the seventeenth-century Italian court.

Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, and Editor in Chief of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Wilbourne is a musicologist specializing in theatrical music and sound in seventeenth-century Italy. Her work engages with questions of gender, performance and sexuality and with repertories of the commedia dell’arte and Italian opera; she is currently at work on a monograph entitled Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Legacy of the Commedia dell'arte. In 2008-9, Emily was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University, and, more recently, her article, “Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love,” was awarded the 2011 Philip Brett Award of the LGBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society.

Old Cabell Hall is located on the south end of UVA's historic lawn, directly opposite the Rotunda (map). Parking is available in the Central Grounds parking garage on Emmet Street, in the C1 parking lot off McCormick Road, and in the parking lots at the UVA Corner. 

Please call the Music Department at 434.924.3052 for more information.  All events are subject to change.