This chapter explores how taxing the traditional livelihood practice of distilling spirits transformed the status of work and traditions, making previously ordinary ways of life illegal, and leading families to weigh their business self-interest against relationships, legal and moral responsibilities, and values. The chapter elucidates the opaque qualities of Istria’s vibrant moonshine market by unpacking the values underpinning it and the relationships between the winemakers, craft distillers, and bootleggers of which it is constituted. Taxing and regulating spirits challenged societal values in ways that forced new considerations into long-standing relationships, particularly around the circulation of the biowaste necessary for distilling. Families sought to maintain livelihoods based on farming, winemaking, and distilling while navigating new regulatory regimes, but those who could not handle such changes retreated from formal business ownership and into the margins of the market. This shift demonstrated that tax can make and unmake markets in sometimes unintended ways. At its core, this chapter illuminates how values in Istrian culture intersect in the practice of distilling and are complicated by the introduction of taxes and regulations.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

Musical life in twentieth-century Oxford featured a wide range of events and institutions beyond the confines of the university and its colleges, often interlinked with the ‘gown’ side. Percy Scholes, writing on ‘General Musical Life at Oxford’ during the MT century, warned: ‘The present account can give but a glimpse here and there of an ever increasingly active musical life, which reached its climax during the Allen Professorship and to recount which in a worthy completeness would enlarge too much the present volume’. In this chapter, we too give a ‘glimpse here and there’ of the active musical life sustained throughout the twentieth century in Oxford. In view of the kaleidoscopic nature of the topic, we take a variety of approaches to our material, with a special focus on local performing groups, visiting performers, and concert organizations. A common thread among the sections that follow is the interaction between town and gown.

Although ‘Oxford has no proper concert hall’, in the twentieth century the city was richly provided with auditoria, large halls, and other suitable spaces for musical use. Moreover, it boasts the first custom-built music room, the Holywell Music Room (opened 1748), noted for its ideal acoustic for chamber music, and for larger-scale events there was both the Sheldonian Theatre, the University's assembly room, associated with music from its inception in the late seventeenth century, and the Town Hall, opened in 1897 (Figures 2.1–2.2).

The ‘porous boundaries’ between town and gown mentioned in Chapter 1 are reflected in many examples of reciprocity. On the one hand, the Music Room at ‘Gunfield’, 19 Norham Gardens, home of the Deneke family associated with LMH, was used for concerts by groups including the Oxford Ladies’ Musical Society (OLMS, which became the Oxford Chamber Music Society), and George Thewlis's Oxford Madrigal Society (OMS), discussed further below. On the other hand, the St Aldate's Choral Society (see Chapter 4 on the choir) advertised its regular performance of Handel's Messiah at the church in 1927, with soloists ‘Miss Trueman, Miss Denne Parker, Mr. Edward Manning (Christ Church Choir), and Mr. Clotworthy (New College Choir)’, adding: ‘Any member of the University who knows the work and would care to sing is welcome to do so’. Other examples include the reciprocity between the Balliol Concerts and the OLMS in booking visiting performers (noted in Chapter 7).

Music has always played a central role in the life of Oxford, both in the city and the university, whether through the great collegiate choral foundations, the many amateur choirs and instrumentalists, or the profes-sional musicians regularly drawn to perform there. Music at Oxford from earlier centuries has long been a fruitful source of study, but the twentieth century has not yet received its proper due. We hope this book will start to make good that deficiency.

It has not been, and could not realistically have been, our aim to assemble a comprehensive history of music in twentieth-century Oxford. Given the enormous scope of the book's subject as a whole, selectivity has inevitably been necessary throughout, and has helped shape the differing approaches and structures of the chapters. Their focus is primarily on the ‘classical’ music tradition. Oxford musicians and visiting performers during the twentieth century cultivated other genres such as pop, jazz, and folk, in venues varying in size from the New Theatre (in some phases known as the Apollo) to a city pub. These areas of Oxford's musical life deserve – and we hope will attract – attention from historians that is beyond the scope of our project here.

The well-established notion of the ‘long century’ has proved indispensable in forming the structure of this volume. Its application has been flexible, depending on the chapter topics. For example, with Chapter 6 on the women's colleges the topic clearly invites us to begin the story from the late 1870s, when the earliest such colleges, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, were established, while Chapter 8 opens in 1930, when the University College Musical Society was founded. For Chapter 2 (‘Music in the Town’), whose topic is packed with a myriad of musical enterprises, it made sense for the chronological range of its content to start from the 1880s, in view of the founding of numerous organizations at that time which lasted well into the following century or beyond. (However, we have not included in that chapter ventures that began life only at the close of the twentieth century.) And while the focus of Chapter 10 is primarily on the decades around the mid-century, when the Faculty of Music was established under Sir Jack Westrup's leadership, it concludes with highlights of its continuing development under successive holders of the Heather Professorship.