This chapter gives a practical overview of writing for a variety of chamber music scenarios, from the traditional (e.g. string quartet) to the unusual (e.g. tuba trio). It describes how to respond to the existing canon of music for ensemble, as well as being creatively inspired by performers in rehearsal situations.

How do composers discover new sounds with old instruments? This chapter looks at the relationship between composers and instruments, and explores how responding to instrument design and experiementing with performing techniques and physical materials can create radical and exciting new sounds and ideas.

Chapter 2, ‘A Mathematical Culture: The Art of Setting Limits’ brings the reader directly into early modern metal mines. The birth of a vernacular culture of geometry is described, detailing the daily work of craftsmen and insisting on the materiality of measuring practices. Surveys, carried out in public during solemn ceremonies, were a keystone of mining laws. The chapter exposes a central hypothesis of this book: At the time, mathematical accuracy acquired a dual meaning. Measurements had to be precise enough to solve intricate technical problems, while at the same time respecting procedures codified in mining customs and laws. Far from being a mere tool, geometry was meant to ensure trust; it was ubiquitous and pervaded many aspects of a miner’s life. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran pastors actively fostered the rise of practical mathematics. Mathematical and religious rationality were equated, making subterranean geometry accurate in a third way, this time as an expression of divine will. The omnipresence of measurements, combined with their legal and religious recognition, ultimately conferred a higher status to the discipline.

This chapter introduces the reader to the book. It first describes the overall purpose of the book that brings together eighteen chapters that use money as a lens to address a wide range of cases from different disciplinary perspectives. Taken together its chapters balance empirical and theoretical work and use multiple methods. While the book does not force an overarching theoretical framework, it aims to facilitate overarching engagement and to encourage new multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research into the role of money and resources on migration. Secondly, the chapter describes how aims, actors, and instruments are three important elements of analysis that return implicitly or explicitly in the individual chapters. It gives examples of how the lens of money can bring new insights to each of these elements in blurring formal distinctions. Thirdly, the chapter introduces the three parts of the book: migration, participation, and citizenship. It explains the choice for these three parts and how and why the distinct chapters connect under each part.

Chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho sets out the evidence for Sappho’s use of metre, showing its position within the tradition of Greek poetic metre as a whole, as well as the sparse evidence that survives for her music.

Frontiers became increasingly central to colonial spatial sciences as the nineteenth century progressed. Examining surveyors’ activities in the field along with the material processes by which maps were produced and circulated, this chapter analyses three broad junctures of frontier surveying based on distinct techniques of seeing and representing space. Route surveys of the 1820s to 1840s mostly gave way to triangulation from the 1850s on, and trigonometrical survey parties increasingly ventured into frontier regions from the later 1860s. By this later period, surveyors and ‘men of science’ in metropole and colony alike deemed comprehending frontier locales a key goal of imperial science. Agents of empire considered these regions as providing unparalleled opportunities, but also substantial challenges to established modes of spatial knowledge and representation. The chapter shows how this ambiguity reached a peculiar resolution, as many surveyors and geographers came to celebrate and to uphold the elusive quality of India’s frontiers.

The benefit concert in early eighteenth-century London is traditionally associated with professional singers and vocal music, but it has equal importance for instrumental music and the Italian concerto in particular – a genre whose success in Britain preceded that of opera seria. As with opera seria it was Continental composers and performers working in London who were the driving force behind the performances of concertos at benefit concerts. The new Italian concerto sought to rival the da capo aria in musical, physical, and aural experiences – a situation unique to Britain at the time. The rise in status of the concerto is also reflected in changes to the language of benefit advertisements. By the 1720s, rather than the earlier and more generic mention of ‘instrumental music’, readers now expected to know the composers and soloists of any concertos presented, just as they came to expect to know the names of singers, operas and arias – a distinction not always given to other instrumental genres.

This chapter examines some of the material aspects of the daily practise of music at court. It investigates the motivations of musical practise at court that took place on a more intimate scale on a daily basis. Schütz notably shows that musical performance at court served purposes of different nature, ranging from entertainment to instruction, from diplomatic tool to image-fashioning, from invitation to the dance to personal recreation. It involved members of the court at every level both as performers and listeners, and was one of the only means by which social barriers could occasionally be blurred. That music was provided by both servants and courtiers is reflected in Shakespeare’s All is True when Queen Katherine requests one of her ladies in waiting to leave her work and perform a song for her in act 3, scene 1. Eventually, Schütz insists on the importance of transmission. Indeed, in order to obtain the skills necessary to discuss music, rulers and courtiers had of course to be instructed in the art. Next to these intimate forms of court performance, then, there existed a pedagogical type of performance: tutors instructing their royal students, both children and adults.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.

Brahms holds a special place among the major instrumental composers in that not only does his life straddle major changes in instrumental design and performance practices, but that recollections and sound recordings exist by younger contemporaries to illustrate these. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to encourage many different perspectives, and the field has become one of lively debate. In this, there are two extremes of interpretation: first the historically driven view that stresses fundamental differences of instruments and performing styles; second, a traditional view of continuity from the past that accepts modern adaptation and expression of these factors. Although the latter is not essentially concerned with historical issues, it cannot be ignored because it represents a permanent counterweight to the historical approach, which remains problematic for many in its implications for modern performance style and social function [see Ch. 23 ‘Instruments’].