While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This brief introduction outlines some of the things that composers might do when they compose, examining how the way composers and think and work is tangled together with the conditions and procedures surrounding the, and how they work.

This chapter considers how notation has been used, questioned, and re-made by composers over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the ideologies behind notation as an interface between composer and performer, and offers some playful examples of notational strategies that invite collaboration with the performer by challenging assumed norms of interpretation and performance.

This chapter contains introductory material, including visual examples that motivate the rest of the book. It explains the book formatting, previews the notation, provides pointers for getting started with Julia, and briefly reviews fields and vector spaces.

‘You can’t place too much store on what’s written down’ (conductor Martyn Brabbins, interviewed in September 2020). This chapter highlights performance issues and philosophies that have arisen from conducting the music of Vaughan Williams. As Hugh Cobbe has noted, ‘the manuscript was merely the first stage for Vaughan Williams’, but for those proceeding beyond that stage, his scores make significant interpretational demands. This is partly due to Vaughan Williams’s (arguably quite generous) attitude to performers, and particularly the agency that his scores give to musicians to make their own choices. Some of the issues raised by Sir Adrian Boult in his correspondence with Vaughan Williams are used as a starting point for interviews with present-day conductors: Martyn Brabbins, Sir Andrew Davis, David Lloyd Jones, Sir Roger Norrington, Christopher Seaman, and John Wilson. Performance for all the musicians interviewed here is about the agency given to performers to explore the ‘inner workings that are often hidden’, the ‘kernel’, and their ‘instinctive reaction’, a position that contrasts greatly with the far more prescriptive notation of other British composers such as Elgar or Britten.

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.

We cannot avoid the ambiguities that are inherent in the process of drawing social boundaries. This essay suggests thinking about the nature of those boundaries in three ways, to show how each can reframe our relationships. First, ‘notation’ is an attempt to conquer ambiguity by creating ever more categories and rules. This is the usual way we think about boundaries, but it also contains important limitations. Second, ‘ritual’ includes those acts that are formalized by social convention and repeated regularly. Ritual crosses boundaries of all kinds: between humans and spirits, men and women, food and people. Third, we can bracket away the categories of both notation and ritual by focussing on the full complexity and idiosyncrasy of a given moment, which we will call ‘shared experience’. On a temporary and ad hoc basis, this strategy lets us take practical action, eliding the problem of categories and the ambiguities they produce. These three analytic models are not mutually exclusive. Using ethnographic examples primarily from China, we argue that all three are necessary, but they intermix in different ways, and the nature of that mix contributes significantly to the local nature of pluralism.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

The introductory chapter describes the notation, concepts, and conventions in relativity theory that is used in this problem book. The main purpose of this chapter is to help the reader to relate to the notation and conventions used in textbooks at hand.

Drum kit related technologies, such as such as sample pads, triggers or percussion controllers, have now become commonplace in the hybrid drum kit setups used by many drummers. For these drummers, technology is no longer considered an ‘addition’ to their acoustic setups as it is essential to the process of replicating and performing their music. The rise in prominence of these technologies cannot be ignored and drum educators must ensure that their students have developed the relevant practical skills and knowledge required for their future career. This chapter reports on the experience of eleven undergraduate drum kit students at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, who have recently engaged in a program of learning situated around drum kit technologies and live performance. Data analysis exposed the following themes related to drummer development: (1) the value of learning via groupwork and flipped classroom approaches; (2) use of notation and development of coordination; (3) the value of learning these technologies for their current and/or future career; and (4) suggested areas for program development. This chapter proposes a possible pedagogic model that can enable drummers to learn and deploy their drum kit technology related skills and highlights opportunities for future development in drum kit technologies.

In his autobiography the fifty-three-year-old Stravinsky claimed: ‘Composers may well envy the lot of painters, sculptors, and writers, who communicate directly with their public without having recourse to intermediaries.’1 This longing to present a musical work as a self-contained entity, as an objet d’art, became central to his promotion of neoclassical music, and he was most outspoken about this in the article introducing his Octet in 1923, where he stated: ‘My Octuor is a musical object.’2

The term ‘declamation’ shifted its meaning from a training and display exercise undertaken by orators to a mode of speech used by tragic actors. By the end of the seventeenth century, the logic of grammar had suppressed the vagaries of orality, and the term ‘declamation’ served to define that which separated dramatic speech from the speech of everyday life. Because speech is driven by the breath and produced by the body, the thought or idea expressed by the actor could not be dissociated from their feeling or passion. In the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth century the dramatic text was conceived as sonorous matter, a visual sign of corporeal actions. The second phase follows from words becoming the arbitrary signs of ideas. From the perspective of a modern taste for self-expression, the earlier conception of the text as a score places unwelcome constraints upon the actor’s freedom.