In a recent think piece for the new-music media site I Care If You Listen, the London-based writer and director Jessica Bailey advocates for accessible notation practices in classical-music pedagogy (‘Earned, Not Learned: How Classical Music Notation is Not Built for Neurodivergent Students’ https://icareifyoulisten.com/2024/06/classical-music-notation/ (18 June 2024)). As an avid pianist with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Bailey finds numbers and symbols more challenging than words and letters, and she recounts how forbidding conventional music notation was for her. Bailey developed her own workarounds, but advanced music study was essentially off limits. She now wonders what doors might be opened to her and other neurodivergent musicians through even small adjustments to notation systems. Drawing a connection between the accessible pre-grade piano-method books of her childhood and modern digital solutions like Lime Lighter and the Odla tactile console, Bailey ponders how notation technologies might help us ‘reimagine and re-programme the sheet music model’.

This article uses Mozart's unfinished singspiel Zaide (k336b, 1780) and its source singspiel Das Serail to reconsider the eighteenth-century Kindertruppen: wandering troupes of young singers, actors and dancers who performed in the court and commercial theatres of Europe. These troupes' repertoire often self-consciously addressed the blend of charm and impropriety that lay behind their controversial appeal. I consider the subgenre of seraglio opera – popular with both youth and adult troupes – and in particular the motifs of the audition scene and the captive's lament as metatheatrical commentaries on the cultural politics of operatic spectatorship. When young actors inhabited the fictional seraglio, their display offered compelling corroboration of contemporary discourse about propriety, naturalness and absorption in the theatre, as well as the new sense of urgency regarding the sheltering of youthful virtue.