My father, the composer Yehezkel Braun, composed his Piano Sonata no. 1 for the Israeli pianist Malka Mevorach in 1957. Its first movement is a classical sonata form in extended tonality, including modal elements and artificial modes. The two main expositional themes change places in the recapitulation. During my research into the connection between sonata form in the twentieth century with its diversity of styles and musical tension, I interviewed Braun, alongside three other composers whose styles varied greatly, ranging across tonal, serial, and electro-acoustic, between 2006 and 2010. Braun remembered the musical thoughts he had while composing the piece many years later. I used a novel method of “continuous interview,” in which the composer would talk almost without interruption while following the music measure by measure. The idea for a continuous interview corresponded with experiments in music cognition that measure the perception of musical tension while listening to music.

I asked Braun to try to remember what he thought in the past and what he thought now.

In the second interview, Braun was astonished by the way he reconstructed his own musical ideas fifty-three years ago, as he remembered the past and commented on it in the present. Talking about his 1957 sonata's first movement, Braun, then eighty-eight years old, vividly remembered that he built the climactic process within a nontonal context at the end of the development section.

The enmity between Harold Godwinson and his brother Tostig plays a key role in many medieval depictions of the year 1066. According to Aelred of Rievaulx, among others, this enmity began in childhood. In his Life of Edward the Confessor, the Vita sancti Eduardi, Aelred relates how Harold and Tostig were playing in the presence of the king and of their father, Earl Godwin: ‘when one of them, more ill-natured than the pleasure of play called for, rose up against the other, turning their play into a fight. Harold rushed wildly at his brother, took his hair with both hands, and would have suffocated the prostrate boy if a greater strength had not quickly pulled him off.’ Godwin refuses to see anything of significance in this event, but for King Edward it is an omen of the ill-feeling that will grow up between the brothers in adulthood. Eventually, he predicts, the hostility between them will affect the entire realm: ‘First they will seem to be playing at deceit and private plots; at the last the stronger will outlaw the weaker and will overwhelm the rebel, and shortly after the death of the one, an ensuing calamity to the other will expiate it.’

In Aelred's formulation, the bad feelings between Harold and Tostig are responsible for the conflicts of 1066 and thus, ultimately, for the Norman Conquest of England.

This book addresses the global significance of music by composers in Israel, exploring the confluence and contrasts of disparate traditions that make up the country's rich and varied cultural tapestry. While Israeli performers have long formed a significant presence in the international arena, music composed by composers in Israel is far less well known and even less discussed in the literature. Yet, throughout Israel's history, chequered with periods of conflict and calm, music by Israeli composers in a wide variety of genres and styles has attained a remarkably dynamic thriving impetus despite, and perhaps because of, the harsh realities of daily life. The nineteen contributions to this volume by experienced and younger scholars, as well as by composers and performers, shed fresh light on themes and topics that, without claiming to be comprehensive, cover a wide range of musical issues, personalities, and genres. At the same time, the book as a whole engages with diverse repertoires to reflect unique encounters between East and West, Arab and Jewish traditions, and regional and wider global trends within art, contemporary, and world musics. The essays reflect a variety of musicological and ethnomusicological approaches to historiography, theory, and comparative analytic methodologies, with an emphasis on richly sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. In the world of the arts, there are no simple formulae to explain the mechanisms whereby culture reflects politics, as there are as many different approaches to express personal and societal political contexts as there are artists.

In early 1814, London was ablaze with talk of the millenarian prophetess Joanna Southcott. Not only had Southcott attained a large following through the influence of her printed prophecies, but she announced that she was now pregnant at the age of 65, with a new messiah. Southcott declared, in The Third Book of Wonders, that she had divinely conceived, and would soon give birth to the second messiah, named Shiloh. News of Southcott's virginal pregnancy quickly spread across England. Throngs of followers attempted to visit her and hear her speak, and numerous gifts were presented to her ahead of the birth, including an ornate crib for Shiloh. Southcott's detractors and critics, however, doubted her pregnancy, and they made this very well known in the presses. Deriding her proclaimed virginity, they lamented the fraud that they believed Southcott was committing on the British public. To combat these attacks, Southcott and her circle arranged for her pregnancy to be inspected by London physicians, surgeons, and midwives, to determine the veracity of her claims. Many of these practitioners affirmed that she was indeed truly pregnant, based on her swollen belly and other signs. Despite these assurances, Shiloh did not come, and in December 1814 Southcott passed away at her home. A few days later, after an autopsy, she was buried in secret at a cemetery in St Johns Wood, London, with only her closest followers present.

Southcott's life, and this divine conception, are well known episodes in nineteenth-century British history, and there are many historical works written about her life and religious influence.

Birthing rooms, chambers within elite houses specifically designated for childbirth, are the setting for evocative and important scenes in a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Middle English romances. This chapter will consider how women created the space of the birthing room, and how romance texts uphold its importance by showing the consequences of it being breached. As these chambers were an accepted and protected female space, their use in romance can tell us much about women, mothers, and gendered interactions. As already stated, lineage, identity, and destiny are key concerns of the romance genre, and showing the birth of the hero is not only often crucial to the narrative, but also communicates how medieval audiences thought about succession, identity, and gender roles. Gail McMurray Gibson argues that women's power was concentrated in and emanated from the birthing room:

The power dynamic surrounding women's essential involvement in reproduction was complicated by a patriarchal desire to deny the importance of the female bloodline to lineal succession.

Perhaps because he had no children of his own, Francisque was intimately linked to the lives and careers of his siblings’ children. During his retirement in Nantes (which may not have been complete), he could have observed their careers benefitting from what contemporaries recognised as an explosion of enthusiasm for the theatre. The years 1740 to 1770 saw an enormous expansion in the construction of permanent theatre buildings and in the public demand for entertainment. In particular, the prestige of French culture meant competition for the best French performers, and the next generation of the Moylin-Sallé-Cochois family, at least six of whom became actors and/or dancers, were pursuing careers that carried their uncle's legacy to every corner of Europe.

When war broke out in September 1939, prior fears over the strength of the destroyer fleet would soon be realised with aggressive and unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain relied so heavily on imported goods that gaining control of the Atlantic and keeping merchant vessels flowing freely was critical because, if merchant ships could be readily sunk and imports disrupted in a successful blockade, Britain would be forced into starvation. It could take just one lone U-boat to wreak havoc, picking off vessels, destroying thousands of tons of supplies and killing hundreds of men. Convoying was effective as long as there were enough escorting ships for the task – especially corvettes and destroyers – and this aspect has come to characterise the Second World War at sea. The initial stages of the Battle of the Atlantic proved nearly disastrous when the large number of merchant vessels being sunk, accompanied by the diversion of destroyers to other duties – such as protection against an invasion and losses in individual campaigns – created a shortage of naval escorts, prompting several crucial efforts to bolster the destroyer fleet over the next few years.

By 1709 Dublin was second in importance only to London in the burgeoning British Empire. An ever increasing number of ships from Europe, Jamaica and elsewhere, transiting through Irish ports, brought with them luxury goods such as wines, spirits and lemons. In an effort to get around one inconvenience of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), French wine was sometimes rebranded as ‘Irish wine’ before being sent on to London. Another thriving industry was linen production, largely controlled by traders from northern counties, although Dublin retained its position as the chief marketplace for linen that was whitened. Yet the city's wide streets and gracious buildings belied the poverty of many of its residents. Charity remained largely in the hands of local churches and David Dickson suggests that the Protestant poor may have been better catered for than Catholics, as parishes had systems in place to raise taxes to support them. In 1706 the workhouse in St James's opened its doors, but here the focus was on work, with little provision for healthcare, and while in 1710 Dr Richard Steevens left money to fund a hospital ‘for maintaining and curing from time to time such sick and wounded persons whose Distemper and Wounds are curable’, it was another decade before anything resembling a voluntary hospital would be operational in the city.

This book chronicles the great Palatine migration of 1709, the descendants of which are scattered throughout Ireland, Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It is also a book about identity, and specifically the difficulty which arises from ascribing identities to groups of migrants. Such imputations can prove difficult to shake off, which happened with the ‘poor Protestant Palatines fleeing persecution’, as they are still recalled three hundred years later. Perhaps this is not surprising given that, in an eighteenth-century public relations exercise, the pens of luminaries such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison were set to work framing and reframing Palatine identity, following the arrival of at least 13,500 migrants in London in one six-month period.

This book highlights overlapping social and religious networks which enabled the Palatine migration to take place in the first instance. It explains how, in an era of rapid colonial expansion, plans were afoot as early as 1705 to move large groups of European migrants to the New World. But issues surrounding religious dissent informed the welcome afforded to Palatines in both Britain and Ireland and help to explain why the numbers of Palatines remaining in Ireland is underestimated.

The Palatines were not the only large group to depart Europe in a thirty-year timeframe. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by King Louis XIV saw an estimated 200,000 Huguenots flee France with an estimated 40,000 settling in England, while it is estimated 10,000 Huguenots settled in Ireland.