ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the “principle of miscellany” that informed both reading and listening practices in early nineteenth-century Britain. Professional anthologizers offered the choicest of extracts to readers, who also curated their own manuscript miscellanies in an effort to organize or commemorate their reading progress. Listeners similarly encountered works through fragments, both in the albums they played at home and in concert programs that valued variety over unity. The essay shows how these piecemeal approaches to musical performance and to literature could work in tandem, reinforcing one another to shape the way operatic music circulated and was heard. It focuses in particular on James Plumptre’s 1805 A Collection of Songs, a well-organized selection of musical and literary epigrams designed to appeal to reader and listener alike, and a few popular lines of Dante that made their way into Rossini’s Otello. It argues that the culture of miscellany that saw the widespread use of the commonplace book equally encouraged a kind of “epigrammatic listening” for focused, concentrated, intense (and perhaps edifying) moments of musical expression.
