This is a book primarily about making things.

Since the “things” in question are pieces of music—ephemeral and intangible constructions of rhythm and tone—it may seem reasonable to put the word “composer” in the title. But I was hesitant do so, since “Composer” is a pretty lofty term, a designation which needs to be earned and which can mean so many things. The word suggests something achieved, whereas this is a book more about process more than achievement, about having an obsession with composing, and trying to get better at it. Even though I am seventy-five years old, I still think of composing as something aspirational, and of myself as an aspiring composer.

Rather than a summary of my public life, of how others responded to my work, this is an account of how my musical life looked to me from the inside, an account of trying to write music while constructing a life around it. To a large extent, it is also about education and teaching and includes accounts of working as a pianist and as a writer of four previous books. If I sometimes write at length about compositions that remained incomplete, and I neglect others that may have been among my better ones, it is because I am trying to tell a story, a story of searching, finding, losing, attempting, failing, at times reaching; a story of becoming.

A brief excursus after the 1820s reveals that the legacies of the Klangsymbolik and the reliance on vocalic theories continued to exert a pervasive influence during the nineteenth century. In 1880, the Rezitator Emil Palleske (1823–80), who counted among the most influential pedagogues of declamation of his time, considered that ‘as the faithful image of the spirit, [the word] must bring [the image] to expression in a pure and unfalsified manner’. As late as 1934, echoes of these vocalic Stimmungen remained still perceptible in Ernst Junger's short text Lob der Vokale (Praise of the vowel). Recalling in 1926 how ‘the Romantics celebrated true orgies of mystical interpretation of vowels’ and mentioning Jakob Grimm, Kerndorffer, W. Schlegel, Diesterweg (Schocher remains absent), Erich Drach could not totally shake off the belief in the inherent expressive quality of the vowels. Since vocalic pitches can be ordered along a pitch scale (in ascending order u-o-a-e-i), this justified for him the undeniable existence of ‘certain connections to the emotional directions of excitement and inhibition’, an argument still consistent with the gradation of emotions (Bestaffelung der Gefühle) that Bielfeld had exposed in 1812.

In the end, what was left from these early vocalic theories was an ossified remnant: vowels had Stimmungen, each of them the acoustic materialisation of a specific emotional state of the soul; but much less clear were the definitions of these Stimmungen. For instance, Jacob Grimm identified a series of affects in the vowels u, o, a, e, i, ü, ö, ä and the diphthongs ei, eu, au, even if these affects remained more vaguely defined than the Stimmungen following Schocher's theory.

The aptly titled poem on the preceding page by one of Africa's founding fathers, the late Agostinho Neto, raises pertinent issues that the continent continues to struggle with today, and with which this book contends. Both the continent's populations and the land itself suffer grief from the colonial past. That past continues to cause pain and suffering from unfulfilled dreams, dreams that died across the continent with the failure to realise the promise of liberation from colonialism. Yet the sun is still shining; the poem also alludes to hope and optimism amidst that grief. This book enquires into why this ‘grief’, as well as the glimmer of hope, persist at least in a portion of the continent, by focusing on its forested landscapes.

Africa's forests and tree-based landscapes contribute to a large proportion of global biodiversity preservation, nearly a fifth or 17 per cent (IPBES, 2018; Bollig, 2022). Such forests and natural landscapes provide 62 per cent of goods and services for Africa's populations besides being sacred to many cultures (IPBES, 2018; Mansourian & Berrahmouni, 2021). Yet the forested landscapes are highly contested by local people, many of whom were forcefully displaced to create them. In many such forested landscapes around the world, local people who have been dispossessed of their forested land and resource rights under colonialism and other jurisdictions have contested such preservation programmes (Shiva, 1988; Guha, 1989; Peluso, 1992). Along with many others (Siviramakrishnan, 1999; Peluso, 1992; Watts & Peluso, 2001; Igoe, 2004; Bosek, 2006; Brockington et al., 2008; Büscher, 2013; Mavhunga, 2014; Maguranyanga, 2009;

Hoon, 2004; Kwashirai, 2007; Kijazi, 2007; Chomba, 2015; Kepe, 2003; Murombedzi, 1994; Ramutsindela, 2004), I have studied the intricacies of such dispossessions and their impacts on local populations.

Count Petöfy, published in 1884, is a relatively early work by Theodor Fontane, Germany's pre-eminent Realist novelist. It was well enough received in Germany when it came out but was subsequently overshadowed by the success of his classic novels of the 1890s. It is nonetheless a significant and many-faceted novel. A consideration of its place in the writer's oeuvre and of striking connections to his other works will shed light on the ways in which character configurations and literary devices feature in subtly changing ways to create the expressive texture of Fontane's fictional world.

Prompted by a real-life case, Fontane takes the marriage of a seventy-year-old Viennese/Hungarian aristocrat to a twenty-four-year-old North German actress and examines the enduring questions of life choices and how they are made, of missteps and the limits of self-realization, questions of age and youth, of intergenerational negotiation, of status and social and economic pressures, of the choice between observing life and participating in it, of the conflict between the needs of the mind and of the body, of identity and autonomy, of gender and social convention. It explores the extent to which free will can be exercised and personal fulfillment achieved. In the wake of the Covid pandemic, the chapters dealing with isolation through illness will resonate anew.

INTRODUCTION

This Appendix should be used in conjunction with pages 3 to 646 in volume 1 of this edition. It is in three parts. The first part contains additional material for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland which has been found since the publication of that volume in 2013. This material arises chiefly from the identification of seventy further occasions of special worship: processions, prayers, services, fast days and thanksgiving days. For forty-seven occasions already recorded in volume 1, further orders, forms of prayer, descriptions or information are provided. English translations are given for Latin texts of documents, including two which were not translated in volume 1. The material is arranged chronologically and presented in the same style as that used in the main parts of the edition, including the use of codes to identify each occasion. New codes are given for the additional occasions, which sometimes require interpolations in the existing system, by use of a, b, c, etc.

The second part presents a number of general orders for the observance of fasts and thanksgivings. These consist of ordinances issued by the English parliament as it sought to obtain better observance of the monthly fast days ordered for England and Wales in January 1642, which continued until April 1649, and the sub-directories for fasts and thanksgivings contained in the Directory for Public Worship of 1645, which was intended for use throughout England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The third part provides a revised summary list of all the known occasions of special worship from 1533 to 1660, in order to show how the additional occasions and the further texts or information relate to the occasions presented in the first volume.

Rossini's Le Siège de Corinthe, a revision of Maometto II, was first given at the Paris Opéra on 9 October 1826. The revival took place on 22 October 1838. Although, as noted above, Berlioz was no lover of ‘dilettanti’, his initially low opinion of Rossini had been revised upwards, especially after getting to know Guillaume Tell; Rossini could not be held responsible for the works of his many imitators. This extract translates the first six paragraphs of Berlioz's review.

This was the first Rossini opera to have been staged at our Académie royale de musique. At its first appearance it unleashed a storm against the Opéra's director: he was bitterly reproached for putting on the stage of the French Opéra, a stage essentially devoted to the dramatic and the serious, the work of an Italian who had made an opera of Le Barbier de Séville.

There were only two things the defenders of the national, dramatic genre forgot. The first is that the main works that had for thirty years underpinned the repertoire of our great theatre, and that created its character of grandeur and lyricism, were composed by Italians and one German: Piccinni, Sacchini, Spontini, and Gluck are not Frenchmen. The second point which should not be forgotten is that Il barbiere di Siviglia, given the supreme skill with which each of its characters is drawn and developed, was the best guarantee any composer could have given of his understanding of staging and the finesse of his feeling for drama. What's more, this same Barbier had been furiously whistled at by the Romans, which must be considered a fairly good recommendation of its composer.

THE FISH SCRIBE

The Fish Scribe is in many ways a typical early fifteen-century scribe. He is atypical because we know where he worked and for whom he worked. More important, fifteen of his manuscripts have been preserved, twelve at Peterhouse, three at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Te Fish Scribe was William Dyngley's principal scribe, active in Cambridge during the first third of the fifteen century. He was the sole scribe of eight manuscripts and the primary textwriter in seven others (Table 4.1). He has not been unnoticed. Parkes observed that Dyngley's books were ‘copied in a superior grade of handwriting’, and both cataloguers of the Peterhouse manuscripts spoke well of his hand. For James his work was ‘fairly written’. Tomson cited the ‘proficient anglicana formata’ in MS 110 and a script ‘close to bookhand’ in MS 154, citing the ‘fish scribe’ by name in MSS 193 and 203. The Rouses were the first to so identify him because of his ‘readily noticeable’ catchwords enclosed in a fish. The fish drawn in text ink was later overdrawn in red or yellow, the colour shift identifying diferent stints of finishing work (Fig. 4.1a). The Rouses suggested that the fish was a pike, presumably because of the elongated shape.

January 15, 1943

German Listeners!

A somber anniversary needs to be marked: ten years of National Socialism. What have they brought the German people? There is only one answer that tells it all: the war, this war, the way it stands today and the way it will end for the German people. Hitler's war, in which your sons bleed to death by the millions, and which will leave the continent— including Germany—a wasteland. When you are asked what was accomplished during this decade, you can trace everything back to the war. From the start, everything pointed toward this war, everything steered toward its realization. Everything else, whatever lying name it was given, beginning with the lying name of the movement itself, all of it was nothing but a rehearsal and systematic restructuring toward the ineludible and ruinous misadventure of this war, which your Führer, of course, had imagined very differently than how it looks now. A desperate struggle, in which Germany feels compelled to heap one unpardonable atrocity onto another, and the physical and moral fallout of which it will have to bear for who knows how long.

All of the so-called benefits that the regime is supposed to have reaped for Germany show their true face in the light of this accomplishment. Their absurdity is thereby revealed even to those who, in their utter wretchedness, ever saw anything else in them but deceit, madness, and infamy. One hears that Hitler liberated Germany from joblessness. Yes—by building up the military. National Socialism—that means solving social questions with war.

The rebellion of princely heirs against their crowned fathers was a relatively common, though not frequent, phenomenon in medieval European politics. While the early fourteenth century was a period when the guiding principles for the legitimate exercise of power and the prerequisites for royal succession were being clarified and defined, it was also punctuated by periodic episodes of armed conflict between European kings and their first-born (primogenitus) sons. Owing to differences both geographical and chronological, there is considerable variation in both the quantity and the quality of the surviving sources for the study of these uprisings. Nonetheless, through the comparative analysis of this material, historians have identified shared ideas and traditions, together with the individual specificities and peculiarities associated with differing royal customs and accepted practices of power, that enabled contemporaries to tailor their discourses and justifications when addressing contrasting circumstances and audiences.

INTRODUCTION

This case came to the attention of the authorities in April 1590 when James Kinnaird and his wife Janet Henderson, in Auchlinsky in the parish of Glendevon, southern Perthshire, were discovered to have some magical objects: nine grains of wheat, a piece of rowan tree, and the joint of a man's finger. This information may have emerged during a commissioner's visitation of the presbytery or diocese. The presbytery of Stirling summoned Kinnaird, who testified that the objects belonged to Isobel Watson. Possibly she had provided them to help Kinnaird's wife in childbirth. Kinnaird brought Watson with him to the presbytery, whose attention was immediately focused on her.

Watson said that she was aged about sixty. She seems to have grown up in Muthill and spent her young adulthood in Perth. Her husband, a fisherman, had died three years after the Reformation, thus in about 1563, and since then she had begged for a living, mainly in the Glendevon area.2 She was a magical practitioner and apparently a midwife, healing people and finding lost and stolen goods. What particularly attracted the presbytery's attention, however, was Watson's account of her visions of fairies and visits to fairyland – visions that, she said, she had experienced since the age of eighteen.

These visions included some extraordinary folkloric detail, making this case one of Scotland's most valuable sources of material for fairy belief. Perceptive discussions of it have been published by Michael F. Graham and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart.3 Just a few points may be picked out here.

In the crisis of his career, when his country demanded the most of him, Sir John Ogle (1569–1640) was in despair. The most experienced soldier in Charles I's Council of War, he was charged in 1625 with assembling and preparing an army for England's war with Spain. The work, Ogle acknowledged, was ‘knotty and full of encumbrance’, yet crucial for the kingdom's safety and honour. Ogle's professional preparation was adequate for the task, but he was ‘perplexed’ in his heart and ‘distracted’ in his judgement to the point that he could not complete it. At risk to his reputation and fortune, with consequences for England's military readiness, he pleaded to be released. Ogle's correspondence from 1625 reveals a man deeply troubled by the pull of duty, the snares of ambition, and the ordeal of melancholy. His personal problems and the demands of public service intersected. While recruiting, equipping, and training the largest land force assembled since 1588, he was plagued by ‘mists of darkness’ and self-doubt that resembled a nervous breakdown. Ogle soldiered on, in mounting distress, until his torment of mind got the better of him.

Contemporaries knew Sir John Ogle as an experienced warrior and a talented administrator. He had achieved distinction in military service in the Netherlands, and was well connected at the highest levels of government. In 1625 he would seem to have been at the peak of his powers. Yet within a year he was the subject of pity. Few places outside creative literature and medical casebooks tell such a tale of mental collapse

A Career Soldier

Born in 1569, not just a younger son, but the youngest of five sons of a Lincolnshire gentleman, John Ogle was forced to seek his fortune in the world.

Collier's political works between 1689 and 1696 could provide the missing piece of the puzzle for understanding the political meaning of his anti-stage tracts. Yet this is not to suggest that the content of his anti-stage works can be correlated directly with contemporary political theories. As far as Collier was concerned, his works on politics and drama were not political treatises and dramatic criticism but different types of conduct books. He observed human affairs, whether political or non-political, in drama or in reality, from the same perspective.

Collier's anti-stage pamphlets are the products of the system of his thought, which took shape in his political debates with pro-Revolution writers and was for the first time formulated in written form in his preface to A Short View in 1698. This system, which I call the ‘rectification of names’, can be summarized in his own words: ‘As Good and Evil are different in Themselves, so they ought to be differently Mark’d.’ This sentence, as discussed in Chapter 1, contains a syllogism, a smuggled premise, and a prescribed action. The syllogism of the standard approach of conduct writing, which ‘promoted’ right ‘principles’ of behaviour, is as follows: All principles of good and evil are different; practice follows principle; therefore, all the practice of good and evil is different. To the syllogism, Collier added a non sequitur that principle follows practice and thereby modified the conclusion as a prescribed action: mark the principles and practice of good and evil differently.

The Fünf Lieder für Männerchor (Five songs for men's chorus), op. 41, is the only essay Brahms saw fit to publish in a genre that had been a prime medium for the expression of patriotic and liberal-nationalist sentiment dating back to the years of Napoleonic domination of the German lands. Writing in the first edition of George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1880), Franz Gehring provided a concise description of the social milieu in which the genre had originally flourished:

LIEDERTAFEL, originally a society of men, who met together on fixed evenings for the practice of vocal music in four parts, drinking forming part of the entertainment. They arose during the political depression caused by Napoleon's rule in Germany; and the first, consisting of 24 members only, was founded by Zelter in Berlin, Dec[ember] 28, 1808. Others soon followed at Frankfort [sic] and Leipzig, gradually relaxing the rules as to numbers. Bernhard Klein founded the “Jüngeren Berliner Liedertafel,” which aimed at a higher standard of art.

To ensure that condemnations were based on evidence ‘out of their mouths’, a set of questions was devised and used universally. The questions established:

• • The nationality of the individual being examined

• • The circumstances of the capture

• • The name and nationality of the master of the captured vessel

• • The identity, cargo and destination of the vessel

• • If the vessel had already been a prize

• • If any personal loss had been sustained

• • In what country the ship had been insured

• • If the cargo was personally owned or destined for market

Separate questions were directed at individuals who might have been ransomed, to establish the conditions of their treatment.

To all commanders, masters, officers, mariners, and others of any ship, vessel, goods or merchandises, which have or shall be seized, or taken as prize, by any private ship of war, or any vessel acting without any commission, and to such other persons who shall be brought to be examined in preparatory, First, let each witness be interrogated to every of the following questions, and their answers to each severally wrote down; as, where were you born? And where have you lived for these seven years last past? Where do you now live? And how long have you lived in that place? And to what prince or state are you, or have you ever been a subject?

The town was in flames.

The narrow streets leading to the moat and the first terrace belched smoke and embers, flames devouring the densely clustered thatched houses and licking at the castle walls. From the west, from the harbour gate, the screams and clamour of vicious battle and the dull blows of a battering ram smashing against the walls grew ever louder. Their attackers had surrounded them unexpectedly, shattering the barricades which had been held by no more than a few soldiers, a handful of townsmen carrying halberds and some crossbowmen from the guild. Their horses, decked out in flowing black caparisons, flew over the barricades like spectres, their riders’ bright, glistening blades sowing death amongst the fleeing defenders.

Ciri felt the knight who carried her before him on his saddle abruptly spur his horse. She heard his cry. ‘Hold on’, he shouted. ‘Hold on!’

Other knights wearing the colours of Cintra overtook them, sparring, even in full flight, with the Nilfgaardians. Ciri caught a glimpse of the skirmish from the corner of her eye – the crazed swirl of blue-gold and black cloaks amidst the clash of steel, the clatter of blades against shields, the neighing of horses –

Shouts. No, not shouts. Screams.

A moat, narrow streets, densely clustered thatched houses, castle walls – already in the first two sentences of this extract we have the typical scenery of a medieval town with its castle and ditch appearing before our inner eye. The fire, the screams and the clamour of vicious battle, the battering ram smashing against the walls are linguistic signs which help us to create a pictorial representation of the scene: the capture of a stronghold by means of fighting. The vocabulary leaves no doubt about the question of where and when this is happening: sometime in the Middle Ages, in a European town or city by the sea or riverside.