Enfilade

From Clemson UP, with distribution by Liverpool UP and OUP:

Alison DeSimone, The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2021), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1942954774, $120 / £90.

In eighteenth-century England, ‘variety’ became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation.

Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She co-edited, with Matthew Gardner, Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has published articles in the A-R Online Anthology, Händel-Jahrbuch, and Early Modern Women. Her article “‘Equally Charming, Equally Too Great’: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London” won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. She is currently an associate editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables

Introduction
1  The Performance of Miscellany in Variety Concerts, 1700–1711
2  ‘An Assemblage of Every Kind’: The Pasticcio Opera Tradition as Miscellany
3  Shaping English Identity in the Songbook iscellany
4  Composition, Cosmopolitanism, and Musical Miscellany
5  Variety in Criticism and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England

Notes
Index

From the University of Pittsburgh Press:

Joseph Clarke, Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0822946571, $60.

A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public. Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.

Joseph L. Clarke is assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto and a licensed architect. His scholarship explores how modern architecture has defined itself as a discipline through particular techniques, theories, and representational conventions.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Note on Translations

Introduction: ‘The Night Shall Be Filled with Music’
1  Domesticating Echo: Clamors in Print
2  Spaces Heard and Seen: Constructing Acoustic Naturalism
3  The Catacoustic Imagination: Enchantment by Immersion
4  Redeeming the Senses: The Acoustics of Total Art
5  Listening Out of Place: Modern Architecture and acoustique électronique
Conclusion: On Further Reflection

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Princeton UP:

Basile Baudez, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0691213569, $65.

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs, military engineers’ conventions, and, finally, painters’ affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public.

Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice.

Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.

Basile Baudez is assistant professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His books include Architecture et tradition académique and A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France, 1765–1837.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Prologue: Architectures in Black and White
1  Imitative Colors
2  Conventional Colors
3  Affective Colors
Conclusion: The Anxiety of the Architect

Appendix: The Draftsman’s Tools

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Image Credits

From Peter Lang:

Caroline Patey, Cynthia Roman, and Georges Letissier, Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s British and European Afterlives, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021), 674 pages, ISBN: 978-1800791558, £60 / $91.

Long after his death in 1764, William Hogarth is still our contemporary. Far from leading a secluded existence in museums and academies, his legacy of vibrant images and provocative ideas remains a powerful source of inventiveness and inspiration for the artists of today, as once for those of yesterday, be it on page, stage, canvas, or digital formats.

After approaching the artist by way of his challenging aesthetic philosophy and his resistance to normative categories, this two-book set considers Hogarth’s pioneering sense of performativity, which has long made him the treasured interlocutor of actors and playwrights, from David Garrick to Bertolt Brecht, or Nick Dear. His work has permeated film, television, the graphic novel, art, and narrative, which all bear witness to his versatile and powerful use of images and its resonance in the modern and contemporary age. Brimming as it is with energy, plenty, affliction, entropy, and empathy, Hogarth’s contradictory universe of chaos and beauty is in tune with ours and resonates vividly with contemporary passions and struggles. The twenty-eight essays in this collection chart the teeming legacies of William Hogarth and explore the ways in which his works and ideas were and are revisited and appropriated in the UK and across Europe. For the eighteenth-century artist lives on as an unforgotten presence, whose invigorating and challenging memory energizes multiple expressive forms, including drama, visual arts, literature, film, graphic novels, and TV serials.

Caroline Patey is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy. Her research interests include Renaissance culture, late Victorian literature, Modernism, and the interactions between art, museums, and literature. Cynthia E. Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research interests include the production, circulation, and collecting history of prints in eighteenth-century Britain. Georges Letissier is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Nantes University, France. His field of speciality is nineteenth-century literature (Charles Dickens, George Eliot) and contemporary British fiction (Will Self, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson).