MUS Lectures Academic Series: Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) and His Image Collection of Chinese Instruments
Theme: Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807) and His Image Collection of Chinese Instruments
Language: English
Speaker: Zdravko Bla?ekovi?
Host: Prof. ZHANG Boyu
Date&Time: Apr. 8, 2024 (Mon.) 18:30
Venue: Classroom 247, Teaching Building(MUS)
Students & Faculties Only.
Admission Free, No Registration Required.
Abstract
During the eighteenth century, the Netherlands was a powerhouse trading with Canton (China), and many Dutch organizations and individuals were amazed by significant collections of Chinese objects. None of them came close in its size and variety of objects to the collection assembled by the lawyer, antiquarian, and proto-sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807), who had never visited China but dedicated years of his life to learning the Chinese language and the history and culture of the country. As a linguist fluent in several ancient and modern languages, between 1765 and 1780, he collected Chinese objects related to all aspects of Chinese life to use them as the foundation for assembling a dictionary of the Chinese language, which he could not obtain in Europe. Besides various realia, mainly from Canton, he also owned a set of fifteen large-size watercolor paintings showing eighty Chinese musical instruments, each annotated by its name written in Chinese. This collection was in the 1770s, when the depictions arrived in The Hague, the most extensive survey of Chinese instruments in Europe. Still, since pictures were in Royer’s private collection and never published, they remained unknown to sinologists and music historians. The pictures are kept today at the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden (inventory numbers RV-360-7899 through RV-360-7913).
The circumstantial evidence suggests that Royer obtained the pictures from the trader in Canton, Carolus Wang, with whom he was corresponding and who sent him some other objects. Wang was also a source of information about Chinese music for the English music historian Charles Burney, who communicated with him via Matthew Raper (1742–1826). Raper, the English trader with the East India Company (1767–1781), owned a collection of Chinese instruments which may have been represented in these pictures, and some of the depicted instruments may have eventually ended with Burney. Another set of images showing Chinese musical instruments that came from Raper’s ownership, was reproduced in Travels in China (1804) by John Barrow (original at The British Library, add MS 33931).
About the Speaker
Zdravko Bla?ekovi? is the Executive Editor of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and director of the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1998, he founded a journal for music iconography, Music in Art, and in 2016, a monograph series, Music in Visual Cultures (Brepols), both of which he has been editing since. His research area concerns 18th- and 19th-century music of Southeast and Central Europe, music iconography, organology, historiography of music, reception of Greek and Roman organology in modern times, musical contacts between Europe and China before the early 19th century, and music symbolism in medieval and renaissance astrology.
