This chapter demystifies orchestration by offering insights into how a good understanding of balance, timbre, and instrumental technique is used to imagine and create interesting sonorities. The chapter begins with an overview of the development of the modern orchestra, before explaining how composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have explored the limits of idiomatic instrumental writing to create dramatic and compelling orchestral textures. It concludes with an explanation of how to approach orchestrating from a ‘short’ piano score.

Messiaen’s cahiers de notations des chants d’oiseaux tell us a great deal about how he fashioned works such as Oiseaux exotiques and Catalogue d’oiseaux from birdsong notations made in the wild and from recordings. Of what benefit can they be to performers? This chapter shows how insights the cahiers give into Messiaen’s imaginative world can influence performers’ approaches, offering perspectives on Messiaen’s perceptions of the ‘artistry’ of the birds, which are not always apparent from the published scores.

The Magic Flute stands out for its eclectic blend of musical styles. While only one scene – the duet of the Armored Men in Act 2 – includes a confirmed musical quotation, some scholars have posited that the opera contains a multitude of musical borrowings and allusions. Flute’s referential character owes much to Mozart’s ingenious use of musical topics. However, allusions to specific works have also been proposed throughout the opera’s history. In 1950, A. Hyatt King assembled an inventory of Flute’s “sources and affinities,” suggesting many plausible but largely unsubstantiated melodic precedents in works by Mozart and others. Scholars have particularly disagreed about the “source” from which Mozart allegedly derived Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” As in the case of the duet of the Armored Men (which quotes a Lutheran chorale), the desire to link Mozart and J. S. Bach has led to divergent claims about the melody’s provenance.

This chapter traces the evolution of the sketch or narrative fragment throughout the modernist era. Scholars of Black print culture have argued that the sketch is the predominant form of nineteenth-century Black writing. The unfinished quality of the sketch resonates with ongoing Black freedom struggles that persist from Reconstruction through the interwar period – temporal parameters that mark African American modernist writing. Through examination of authors from select flashpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the era, this chapter illustrates how African American modernists transformed genres popularized during the late nineteenth century while gesturing toward the future. Turning to Jean Toomer’s Cane, one of the era’s most definitive Afro-modernist creations, I connect threads between the anti-lynching discourse featured in Frances E. W. Harper’s and Ida B. Well’s writings with Toomer’s genre-bending collection of poetry, prose, and dramatic sketches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’ novelette Maud Martha: a “late” modernist text.

In Chapter 4 explores Joan Hassall’s (1906–88) illustrations for The Folio Society’s editions of Jane Austen’s novels and stories. Completed between 1957 and 1963, and then added to in 1975, these editions tend to be criticized for blending too seamlessly into Austen’s novels. Hassall, whose style was anachronistic in the 1950s through the 1970s but fittingly like that of Austen’s time, can seem (and has been described as) apolitical, unassertive, and small, descriptors that were once negatively applied to Austen. Hassall took a craft-based ownership of the Austen canon, finding the author in even the smallest of notches and grooves of her engravings. She collected, for example, scraps of ribbons and fabrics from the Georgian era, which she then copied and traced onto her woodblocks and patterned onto the covers, frontispieces, and chapter headings of her Austen editions. Hassall is less reinventing the nineteenth-century novel than retracing and reinhabiting it. Yet she, like the other artists in this book, invested an enormous amount in her readings of the novels, not just in the details of her images, but in the labor of engraving itself, which she did despite nearly crippling arthritic pain.

It was inevitable that Igor Stravinsky would experiment with serialism, given his penchant for interval-based composition, even making a comment to Milton Babbitt that he had always composed with intervals. Stravinsky’s intrigue with intervallic patterns is significant in some of his earlier works – particularly the motivic networks supporting the narratives of Firebird (1910) and Perséphone (1934). In fact, examining the interval ordering in the motives from these works, Stravinsky, perhaps unwittingly, retains the exact order of intervals while producing twelve different pitch classes. In retrospect, this seems to have foreshadowed the development of his own brand of serialism in his later years, beginning with Cantata in 1952, and maturing over the fourteen years through works such as Septet, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Canticum Sacrum, Threni, Agon, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam, Abraham and Isaac, Elegy for J.F.K., Introitus: T.S. Eliot in memoriam, and his last major work, Requiem Canticles, in 1966.

Approximate computation methods with provable performance guarantees are becoming important and relevant tools in practice. In this chapter we focus on sketching methods designed to reduce data dimensionality in computationally intensive tasks. Sketching can often provide better space, time, and communication complexity trade-offs by sacrificing minimal accuracy. This chapter discusses the role of information theory in sketching methods for solving large-scale statistical estimation and optimization problems. We investigate fundamental lower bounds on the performance of sketching. By exploring these lower bounds, we obtain interesting trade-offs in computation and accuracy. We employ Fano’s inequality and metric entropy to understand fundamental lower bounds on the accuracy of sketching, which is parallel to the information-theoretic techniques used in statistical minimax theory.

Throughout his career, Mark Twain wrote short fiction, from short comic sketches to longer short stories. His first big national success came in 1865 with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which he revised several times over the next decade. His short fiction is most often humorous, often satiric, and often burlesques of established genres. But he also tackled serious topics like racism. He published his short fiction in magazines like The Atlantic, then collected most of them in books. In his later years, his short fiction took on a more bitter tone, such as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Twain was writing in a period when the short story became fully developed in American writing, and he was part of that trend.