This brief introduction asks what a compositional technique actually is, and what sorts of skills, knowledge, and experience a composer needs to draw on when working with music and sound. It thinks first about the idea of musical genre and function, before briefly addressing musical technology, style, and finally the importance of listening as a core compositional technique.

This chapter examines ways of working as a composer for screen, explaining every step of the process – from reading through a script or treatment to the final recordings and edits – and offers advice on how to approach collaboration and networking in the film industry.

This chapter seeks to understand ‘legal science’ from the internal point of view of each tradition and society, in order to avoid a conception too heavily influenced by contemporary views. To do so, reference is made both to the set of activities carried out by ‘legal experts’ in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counseling and education), and to the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societies. This approach requires first to establish the extent to which, in each society under consideration, knowledge of law was considered as autonomous knowledge. A sociological perspective is then adopted, identifying who in each society were considered legal experts, i.e. persons deemed to possess the legal knowledge to such a degree that it characterized their social position and/or function. The chapter then proceeds in a progressively more content-oriented manner towards a comparative description of legal science, focusing on how legal training took place in each society under consideration and in what literary forms the legal experts expressed themselves, to finally arrive at the core question, namely the description of the respective forms of legal reasoning.

This chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases.

Our knowledge and understanding of Western classical music – its history, culture, criticism, and analysis, and our encounters with music directly as performers and listeners – rest on a number of fundamental resources: dictionaries and encyclopaedias, histories of music, analytical and critical studies, and repertoire in editions as well as cultivated in performance, whether live or recorded. This rich, interlocking array of resources has traditionally and systematically either sidelined or ignored totally the contribution of women as composers to the musical culture it represents. This volume builds on the remarkable transformation in musical scholarship since the 1970s that has, on the one hand, sought to create for women the kinds of resources formerly assembled exclusively for male composers, and, on the other hand, applied feminist thinking to the institutions, discourses, values, and silences that have characterized music history itself.