I write this in mid-December, as we hurtle towards the winter solstice and the darkest day of the year. It is already a year since a ‘novel coronavirus’ appeared in Wuhan. By the time you’re reading this, it will be spring, and with the start of mass vaccination at the close of 2020, it begins to seem as if the equinox might bring new light in more ways than one.

Whatever new beginnings the spring might bring, it also brings cause for a moment of reflection, as one particular sadness of 2020 was the loss of Professor Nicholas Temperley in April. Nicholas was working on the article that features in this issue until he was unable to continue in March. He handed the remaining work over to two colleagues, Professor Beth Quitslund and Professor Joseph Herl, and I am enormously grateful to both of them for their efforts in seeing the article through to publication. I am also personally grateful to Cambridge University Press for making both this article and Nicholas’s earlier contribution to JRMA (in 1993, on the Lock Hospital) available free of charge for 12 months. I had hoped that Nicholas might see this one in print if we brought its publication forward to autumn 2020, but the greater forces of the universe did not concur. I did not know him well at all, this being the only time our paths crossed, but brief as our encounter was, I had the distinct impression of a man whose memory will shine brightly for those who did know him. I’m delighted to see this article in print.

The rest of this issue showcases much of the vibrancy and richness of twenty-first-century musicology. From Elizabethan psalm tunes, we work our way through to songwriting as autobiography, the grooves of Cuban son, and the work of the contemporary composer Hans Abrahamsen. To celebrate this vibrancy, there has been a change of colour for the journal’s cover – over the coming years, we’ll move through the colour spectrum, issue by issue, with a view to mirroring visually on your shelves a full spectrum of music scholarship on the pages inside.