9.45am: Registration
10.00am: Notes from the city that never sleeps – music and New York, Rikky Rooksby
Throughout the twentieth century New York has inspired an enormous creative output in many musical genres. In this lecture Rikky Rooksby will illustrate this creativity by delving into New York-connected music by composers such as Ives, Gershwin, Bernstein, Ellington, Adams and Reich, and notable songs by such popular artists as Bacharach and David, Carole King, Laura Nyro, Simon and Garfunkel, Television and Bruce Springsteen.
11.15am: Coffee/tea
11.45am: New York Directors – the films of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, Pat O'Shea
These Jewish, Italian and African American directors exemplify the diversity of the city. Their films capture both the particularity of their communities and the vibrant context of New York, but their appeal and resonance are much wider. A key film from each director will be the starting point for an exploration: Manhattan, Mean Streets and Do the Right Thing.
1.00pm: Lunch
2.00pm: New York and Pop Art, Nick Pearson
With WWII, modern art’s still-beating heart transplanted from Paris to New York. But by the 1960s, the post-war American art of Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning was being eclipsed by brighter, brasher canvases.
The older Abstract Expressionists referenced big themes, like ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Tragedy’ and critics talked about ‘Existential Authenticity’. But a new tendency had emerged in Manhattan’s studios and galleries, rejecting such high-mindedness. Instead, it interrogated the modern landscape of signs, mass-market imagery and advertising – and did it with irony, humour or a mechanical detachment that typified, celebrated and critiqued the media-soaked age.
3.15pm: Coffee/tea
3.45pm: Literary portraits of the Jazz age city, New York in works Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos and F Scott Fitzgerald, Kiri Walden
We will explore the way the writers of the 1920s and 30s captured a version of New York that has dominated our views of the city ever since. A city both beautiful and dangerous, brilliant, creative but also lonely. The Jazz age was a period in which New York dominated the world, and works such as The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer and Parker’s bitter ironic poetry bring that magical time to life.
5.00pm: Course disperses
