Enfilade

From The Pennsylvania State UP:

Oliver Wunsch, A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2024), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0271095288, $100.

Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth. While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value. Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.

Oliver Wunsch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Boston College.

With the original French edition (Nuanciers: éloge du subtil) published in October, the English translation is due in February from Princeton UP:

Anne Varichon, Color Charts: A History, translated by Kate Deimling (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-0691255170, £45 / $55.

A beautifully illustrated history of the many inventive, poetic, and alluring ways in which color swatches have been selected and staged

The need to categorize and communicate color has mobilized practitioners and scholars for centuries. Color Charts describes the many different methods and ingenious devices developed since the fifteenth century by doctors, naturalists, dyers, and painters to catalog fragments of colors. With the advent of industrial society, manufacturers and merchants developed some of the most beautiful and varied tools ever designed to present all the available colors. Thanks to them, society has discovered the abundance of color embodied in a plethora of materials: cuts of fabric, leather, paper, and rubber; slats of wood and linoleum; delicate skeins of silk; careful deposits of paint and pastels; fragments of lipstick; and arrangements of flower petals. These samples shape a visual culture and a chromatic vocabulary and instill a deep desire for color.

Anne Varichon traces the emergence of modern color charts from a set of processes developed over the centuries in various contexts. She presents illuminating examples that bring this remarkable story to life, from ancient writings revealing attention to precise shade to contemporary designers’ color charts, dyers’ notebooks, and Werner’s famous color nomenclature. Varichon argues that color charts have linked generations of artists, artisans, scientists, industrialists, and merchants, and have played an essential and enduring role in the way societies think about color. Drawing on nearly two hundred documents from public and private collections, almost all of them previously unpublished, this wonderfully illustrated book shows how the color chart, in its many distinct forms and expressions, is a practical tool that has transcended its original purpose to become an educational aid and subject of contemplation worthy of being studied and admired.

Anne Varichon is an anthropologist specializing in material cultures and ideas about color. She is the author of Colors: What They Mean and How to Make Them.

Coming in March from Brepols:

Giulia Iannuzzi, Futuristic Fiction, Utopia, and Satire in the Age of the Enlightenment: Samuel Madden’s ‘Memoirs of the Twentieth Century’ (1733) (Brepols, 2024), 460 pages, ISBN: 978-2503606026, €125.

Published anonymously in 1733, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest futuristic novels known in Anglophone and Euro-American literature. It foregrounds an acceleration of history brought about by an increasing degree of global interconnectedness and the exclusion of prophetism and astrology as credible ways to know the future. The work of Samuel Madden, an Irish writer and philanthropist of Whig sympathies, it consists of a collection of diplomatic letters composed in the 1990s, which the narrator claims were brought to him from the time to come by a supernatural entity. Through these correspondences, twentieth-century world scenarios are spread out before the reader, in which British naval power rules the waves and international commerce, while the transnational scheming of the Jesuits threatens the independence of weaker European courts.

This book—which includes a study followed by an annotated edition of the text—assesses the cultural significance of this literary work, as an apt observatory on how historical time as a cultural construction was shaped, during the eighteenth century, by new forms of transnational circulation of information, and by the dubious space carved out in European culture by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century debates on the nature of historical knowledge. Through and by means of the Memoirs case study, this volume aims to contribute to a wider cultural history of the future and speculative fiction. The novel’s ironic distancing of beliefs considered to be superstitious and absurd—such as divination techniques and occult and magical disciplines—offers an exceptional testimony to the negotiation of the boundaries of verisimilitude and credibility within a religious enlightenment.

Giulia Iannuzzi has worked on the history of publishing and translation processes, and on the history of speculative imagination in a comparative perspective. Her articles have been published in academic journals such as History, History of Historiography, Cromohs, Perspectives, American Literary Scholarship, and Journal of Romance Studies.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Knowledge, Power, and Time in the Age of the Enlightenment

Part I | Samuel Madden’s Eighteenth-Century Memoirs from the Future
1  Where Was the Future?
2  When Was the Future?
3  An Irish Whig between Philanthropism and Literature
4  An Eighteenth-Century Twentieth Century
5  An (Unreliable) Historian of the Future
6  A ‘Good Genius’ and the ‘Scene of Things below’
7  Empirical Science, Global Consciousness, and ‘the History of Future Times’
8  Blurring the Dichotomy between History and Fiction
9  Satirising Past Futures
10  ‘Publishing’ the Letters
11  ‘This Prodigious Society’: Anti-Jesuit Satire
12  Whose Credulity, Whose Credibility
13  Bookish Mysteries and an ‘Alternate George VI’
14  Concluding Remarks

Part II | Memoirs of the Twentieth Century
A Note on the Text
Samuel Madden, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century

Notes to the Text
Bibliography
Index

Published in the UK in October and coming to the American market in the spring; from Picador:

Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera (London: Picador, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1529059861, £25 / $30.

At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there the last when Mozart was seventeen, all vividly recounted here by acclaimed conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous than the prosperous north, and to Venice, the carnivalesque birthplace of public opera. All the while Mozart was absorbing Italian culture, language, style and art, and honed his craft. He met the challenge of writing Italian opera for Italian singers and audiences and provoked a variety of responses, from triumph and admiration to intrigue and hostility: in a way, these Italian years can be seen as a microcosm of his whole life. Evocative, beautifully written and with a profound understanding of eighteenth-century classical music, Mozart in Italy reveals how what he experienced during these Italian journeys changed Mozart—and his music—forever.

In Jane Glover’s long and hugely successful career as a conductor, she has been Music Director of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Artistic Director of The London Mozart Players, and, since 2002, is Music Director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque. She has conducted all the major symphony and chamber orchestras in Britain, as well as many in the United States of America and across the world. She appears regularly at the BBC Proms and is a regular broadcaster, with highlights including a television series on Mozart. She is also the author of Mozart’s Women and Handel in London. She lives in London.

From Yale UP:

Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti, The Horn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0300118933, $45.

A rich and fascinating account of one of music history’s most ancient, varied, and distinctive instruments

From its origins in animal horn instruments in classical antiquity to the emergence of the modern horn in the seventeenth century, the horn appears wherever and whenever humans have made music. Its haunting, timeless presence endures in jazz and film music, as well as orchestral settings, to this day. In this welcome addition to the Yale Musical Instrument Series, Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti trace the origins of the modern horn in all its variety. From its emergence in Turin and its development of political and diplomatic functions across European courts, to the revolutionary invention of valves, the horn has presented in innumerable guises and forms. Aided by musical examples and newly discovered sources, Meucci and Rocchetti’s book offers a comprehensive account of an instrument whose history is as complex and fascinating as its music.

Renato Meucci directs the Cultural Heritage department of the celebrated Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Gabriele Rocchetti is horn professor at the Conservatory Luca Marenzio, and a fine natural horn player.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Foreword

Part I
1  Preliminary Note on Roman Military Instruments
2  Early Horns and Calls
3  The Coiled Trompe
4  Spiral Instruments
5  Early French Hunting Fanfares
6  Hooped Models
7  Preserved Instruments
8  Von Sporck and the Trompe de Chasse
9  The Natural Hunting Horn (Jadgwaldhorn)
10  Trumpet and Horn Players
11  The Natural Horn at its Zenith (Orchesterwaldhorn)
12  Duets
13  Four Case Studies: Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Telemann
14  Instruments’ Names in the Baroque Era

Part II
15  The Classic Era
16  New Crook Systems
17  The Classical Repertoire
18  The Heyday of the Hand Horn
19  Transitional Systems

Part III
20  Valve Horns
21  Further Valve Systems
22  Reports by Contemporaries
23  Early Music Literature
24  Valve Dissemination: A Regional Overview
25  A Few Leading Composers
26  Double Horn
27  The Horn in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
28  The Repertoire of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
29  The Present-Day Horn

Bibliography
Index

Appendix 1  Notation
Appendix 2  High vs. Low Horn in Haydn’s Symphonies
Appendix 3  Two Letters by Blühmel

From Yale UP:

David Lasocki, Robert Ehrlich, Nikolaj Tarasov, and Michala Petri, The Recorder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300118704, $50.

The fascinating story of a hugely popular instrument, detailing its rich and varied history from the Middle Ages to the present

The recorder is perhaps best known today for its educational role. Although it is frequently regarded as a stepping-stone on the path toward higher musical pursuits, this role is just one recent facet of the recorder’s fascinating history—which spans professional and amateur music-making since the Middle Ages. In this new addition to the Yale Musical Instrument Series, David Lasocki and Robert Ehrlich trace the evolution of the recorder. Emerging from a variety of flutes played by fourteenth-century soldiers, shepherds, and watchmen, the recorder swiftly became an artistic instrument for courtly and city minstrels. Featured in music by the greatest Baroque composers, including Bach and Handel, in the twentieth century it played a vital role in the Early Music Revival and achieved international popularity and notoriety in mass education. Overall, Lasocki and Ehrlich make a case for the recorder being surprisingly present, and significant, throughout Western music history.

David Lasocki, formerly head of music reference services at Indiana University Bloomington, has been a researcher of the recorder for over fifty years. Robert Ehrlich is professor of recorder at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction — David Lasocki
1  The Era of Medieval Recorders, 1300–1500 — David Lasocki
2  The Era of Renaissance Recorders, 1501–1667 — David Lasocki
3  The Era of the Baroque Recorder, 1668–1800 — David Lasocki
4  Duct Flutes in the Nineteenth Century — Nikolaj Tarasov
5  The Recorder in the Twentieth Century — Robert Ehrlich
Epilogue — Michala Petri

Notes
Bibliography
Index