The highlight of this solo guitar program is a work by composer Douglas Boyce, who dedicates his Partita No. 3 (“La Comète”) to UC Davis Associate Professor Claire Goldstein in the Department of French and Italian. The musical work is done in conversation with Goldstein’s forthcoming book, “In the Sun King’s Cosmos: Comets in the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France” (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

“The Sun King’s Cosmos” is a study of the unusually bright comets of 1664–65 and 1680–81, which appeared not only in the sky but also in ballets and theater, letters and early journalism, architecture and institutions, theology and literary style. Goldstein studies how these comets—considered at the time to be chaotic and without discernible form or pattern—organized curiosity, scrutiny, resistance and doubt during the reign of King Louis XIV in France.

Program

J.S. Bach: Suite in C Minor, BWV 997

Douglas Boyce: Partita No. 3 (“La Comète”)

Free, a Shinkoskey Noon Concert​