This chapter focuses on some of the leading ideas about music articulated in Arabic and Persian writings between the second and eighth centuries of Islam. The engagement of Muslim philosophers with their readings of Plato and Aristotle provides a strong impetus for reflection on the nature of music and poetry. Arabic writings on music followed three principal lines of inquiry: music as a branch of mathematics, music making as a topic of belles-lettres and the forms of listening that are legitimate from various religious perspectives. Conceptions of the nature and potential value of musical knowledge are formed in relation to ideas about the nature and relative value of other areas of learning and other spiritual disciplines. Throughout the Muslim world, orally transmitted lore has continually found its way into treatises with scientific pretensions, thereby gaining an aura of authority that makes it all the more useful in oral pedagogy.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a transformation in the nature of British leisure habits. Cookery books and instruction manuals for the kitchen had been in circulation for some time, reaching back to the sixteenth century at least, and in the eighteenth century one of the best-known examples was Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery, made plain and easy. A number of bibliographies of cookery and household management books have been published and their long lists of titles indicate the wide range of publication in this area. The eighteenth-century Romantic philosophy of gardening held that it was the living representation of landscape painting but the Victorians scaled down this ambition to suit the more limited landholdings and means of the upper-middle and middle classes. While cookery and gardening could be seen in the Victorian period as either hobbies or mandatory activities to keep household and property in order, interest in music could be seen as an entirely leisure pursuit.