We all know what early music is supposed to sound like – or at least we have good reasons to think we do. The modern performance tradition has established a remarkably resilient sonic imaginary that can be indexed as easily as by calling to mind a hooded monk bathed in ethereal light or one of Botticelli’s beflowered maidens. Chapter 16 connects performance instructions from a little-known musical edition of the 1840s with prevailing performance norms today, arguing that we moderns have tended to conceal the musical poetics described in this book by neglecting documentary evidence about tempo, acoustics, timbre, and the somewhat slipperier “intensity.” However scary, resetting our esthetic compasses and engaging more empathetically with the past can have the side benefit of making our present-day sounds more inviting and more inclusive. The book concludes by offering a path out of elitism, anachronism, and inhibition and toward full-blooded engagement.

Narrative is a “mimesis” of human action, as defined by Aristotle. Mimesis is achieved by means of discourse, the combination of expressive signs available in a medium. In graphic narratives or story-manga, discourse utilizes three primary elements: image, word, and panel, with various expressive techniques developed for each. The actual signs of discourse, however, serve only as a starting point. It is by utilizing imaginative supplementation that the reader is able to interpret events, receive impressions, understand temporal and spatial transitions, and grasp the overall structure of the narrative world, that is, the story. The cognitive process of the reader can be broken down into three hypothetical phases: micro-, meso- and macroscopic. This chapter provides an outline of each phase in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of manga as a narrative medium in terms of its expressive means and the resulting narrative experience.

Physical time refers to five context-independent elements of time: tempo, duration, timing, sequencing, and stages. It makes two contributions. It refines the analysis of historical time by focusing on the rhytms in which it unfolds. It thus supplements the analysis of what changes in content by paying attention to how it changes in rhythm. It also refines causal analysis by treating the elements of physical time that produce distinct causal effects; these are frequently overlooked by linear notions of causality. CHA employs both physical time and historical time, and this distinguishes it from other methodologies. It configures these elements of time in distinct ways, which define the three strands of CHA: eventful, longue durée, and macro-causal analysis.

The German army recognised before 1914 the importance of communication to the third command task, reducing uncertainty, and evolved organisational, personal and technical means to handle it. Realities of battle in 1917 confirmed some pre-war ideas and disproved others. Headquarters expanded and were forced to the rear by firepower. Bureaucratic burden continually increased despite attempts to reverse it and partly because of failure to adopt modern methods of information handling. Personal contact remained essential to command, though 1917 conditions made it more difficult. The same conditions led to ever-greater reliance on technical communications means and organisations, which were continually developed. Performance of the communications system in the spring fighting was at least adequate, including because of the attackers’ slow tempo. Subsequent developments of doctrine and organisation. Unstoppable growth of bureaucracy and linked problem of falsified reporting were danger signals that the urge to reduce uncertainty had got out of hand.

This chapter provides a quantitative analysis the strategy clusters Southeast Asian and Caribbean interactants use for claiming or holding a turn at talk. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially use the same strategy combinations, although some differences also become apparent. The second part of the chapter zooms in on the frequency of selected phonetic and syntactic resources and compares their usage across the two speaker groups. Again, both similarities and differences between the speaker groups become apparent; for example, with respect to the usage of tempo downsteps or direct requests. These findings support the notion of a locally inflected conversational infrastructure, which is influenced by both cultural context and variety-specific preferences.

This paper covers the methods for measuring rhythm and the main paradigms used to study rhythm perception. An overview of ideas about speech rhythm is provided, starting with the traditional view of isochrony and rhythm classes. Production and perception methods used to establish rhythm-class differences are presented and critically reviewed, as are a number of research practices associated with them. Recent developments leading to an alternative view of rhythm are discussed, and suggestions for pedagogical practice and future research are provided.

Although Adès scholarship has made significant inroads towards understanding the analytical and interpretative richness of his music, the actual sound of it, and the range of meanings a performer might tease from it, have barely begun to be addressed. In this chapter I propose ways in which musical structure in Adès’s music might be reconceived in response to performance. Adès’s own analytical and recorded accounts of Janáček’s ‘In memoriam’ are used to provide preliminary theoretical and methodological orientation, after which I examine Adès’s Mazurkas Op. 27 to consider the dynamic interaction between structures, genres and performance traditions in recordings by multiple pianists. Finally, I turn to recordings of Darknesse Visible to consider the role performance can play in rethinking the relationship of expression and structure in Adès’s music. Underpinning both accounts is a sense of how performances can access the temporal experience of how time passes in Adès’s music.

Any consideration of Fauré as performer is inextricably bound up with how he edited and marked up his scores for performance. A central concern of this chapter is, therefore, how we may read through his notation, its quirks and its variants, to sense Fauré the performer. Most immediately, can doing so shed light on works that have long been neglected or regarded as problematic? The issue needs confronting if Fauré is not to remain peripheral in the repertoire except for a few works, mostly earlier ones. I, too, found many of Fauré’s later works initially impenetrable, until rehearsing and performing them made sense of each one – provided their narratives are coherently articulated and paced in performance. It often involved interaction with critical editing, through reciprocal processes of source discoveries, on the one hand, and practical experiment with extant readings on the other, particularly when these revealed ambiguities.

This chapter introduces mensural notation and shows how changes of practice affect musical style during the Renaissance, mirroring the approach in the previous chapters in the domain of pitch. Here again, two crucial changes are observable, roughly contemporary with those observed in Chapter 5: the first is the gradual abandonment of major prolation (c. 1440) as the predominant mensuration in favour of perfect tempus, and the alternation of tempus perfectum and tempus imperfectum (with minor prolation) as a structural feature in larger-scale works; the second is the adoption of tempus imperfectum as the standard mensural sign during the final quarter of the fifteenth century, after which the notational subtleties associated with the system of ‘four prolations’ gradually fell out of use. But this chapter also demonstrates the great elegance of the mensural system, showing its flexibility and economical presentation of situations of considerable rhythmic intricacy, which has an aesthetic quality all of its own. In many cases, the conception of the individual work is grounded as much in its notation as in the sounding result.

This chapter seeks to address the basic question that poses itself to any listener: how can two performances of a given piece of Renaissance polyphony sound radically different and unlike. It reviews the reasons for this impression: what the sources and notation tell us (and what they don’t) regarding performance forces, treatment of pitch, tempi, proportions, and performance conditions and contexts.The chapter also offers an overview of the changes of fashion and practice since the onset of sound recordings of Renaissance music. Crucial to the question is the way in which our assumptions and biases inform our interpretation of this information (and other sources of knowledge on performance practice), just as they did those of previous generations. As in the rest of this book, I seek here to define the relationship between (and readers’ awareness of) the twin claims of knowledge and interpretation, the tension between which plays itself out in concrete terms in the domain of performance practice.

Chapter 8 – Our Transforming World – discusses the general conclusions from the book's exploration of stories of societal transformation across the world. In particular, it focuses on the governability of transformations, the system boundaries, the tempo of transformations and the drivers of change, such as technology, political economy, learning, narratives and perspective change. Finally, the chapter points at the interconnectedness of personal, political and practical transformations.

In this chapter we situate music education as ‘praxis’ (Alperson, 1991; Elliott, 1995; Regelski, 1998), encouraging personal agency and allowing children to become composers, performers and audiences as part of their daily lives. The importance of this approach is that musical learning and musical understanding occur in many ways: through listening, sharing, discussing, reflecting, performing, composing and recording. All of these processes should be conceived of culturally, socially and holistically in ways that enable children to explore connections between concepts, skills and understandings. In this approach, a music learning community of practice (Wenger, 2009) that encourages learning in multiple ways through learner agency can be established in your classroom.