The Power of Pastiche

Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. With Matthew Gardner (University of Tübingen), she co-edited 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 also currently an Associate Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

• IntroductionChapter 1: The Performance of Miscellany in Variety Concerts, 1700-11Chapter 2: “An Assemblage of Every Kind”: The Pasticcio Opera Tradition as MiscellanyChapter 3: Shaping Taste and Identity in the Songbook MiscellanyChapter 4: Composition, Cosmopolitanism, and Musical MiscellanyChapter 5: Miscellany and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century England

'This scholarship is a model of how to use documentary evidence to explore and analyse audience tastes, concert programming, and early music criticism, generously illustrated with music examples. [...] DeSimone not only provides valuable scholarship that gives us a fuller picture of musical life during the beginning of the eighteenth century, she also uncovers new information and repertoire. In my view, The Power of Pastiche is required reading for anyone working in the area of eighteenth-century English music.' Vanessa L. Rogers, NABMSA Reviews