Modern editions of Catullus probably derive, at one or two removes, from a single (now lost) manuscript called the codex Veronensis (V), which returned to or resurfaced in Verona around ad 1300. This text, which marks poem divisions somewhat haphazardly and often wrongly (especially in the elegiacs), was subsequently divided (as conventionally numbered) into c.116 poems. As extant it is a collection of unparalleled diversity: poems range from 2 to 408 lines in length written in a wide variety of metres – lyric, iambic (including choliambics or scazons), phalaecian hendecasyllables, hexameters, galliambics, and elegiacs – and dealing with subjects that include the intensely personal, the quotidian and the exotically mythical, tender expressions of love, jocular amicability and viciously obscene invective in language that reflects as appropriate the gutter, the elevated dignity of epic or the refinement of the self-consciously learned urban elite.

Chapter 5 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the relationship between Sappho and her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus, examining the literary and visual evidence and the different ways that scholars have interpreted it.

Chapter 26 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, England, and the United States, examining figures such as Cicely Hamilton, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney,Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Samuel-Auguste André David Tissot, Sapphism, Honoré Daumier, Pierre Lou?s, Henry Thornton Wharton, and Emily Dickinson.

Chapter 10 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho describes the distinctive features of Sappho’s poetic dialect, highlighting especially significant points and noting particular difficulties.

Video game music is often sonically similar to film music, particularly when games use musical styles that draw on precedent in cinema. Yet there are distinct factors in play that are specific to creating and producing music for games. These factors include:Apart from books and manuals that teach readers how to use particular game technologies (such as, for example, Ciarán Robinson’s Game Audio with FMOD and Unity),1 some composers and audio directors have written about their processes in more general terms. Rob Bridgett,2 Winifred Phillips,3 George Sanger,4 Michael Sweet,5 Chance Thomas,6 and Gina Zdanowicz and Spencer Bambrick7 amongst others have written instructive guides that help to convey their approaches and philosophies to music in games. Each of these volumes has a slightly different approach and focus. Yet all discussions of creating and producing game music deal with the three interlinked factors named above.

There can be no doubt that interest in video game music has grown considerably in recent years. It is notable that this passion is not reserved only for the latest releases, but extends back to the earliest days of the form, with as much praise heaped upon 1980s Commodore 64 or 1990s Amiga 500 music as on the high-profile symphonic soundtrack du jour. Contemporary game developers, such as Terry Cavanagh, underscore games like vvvvvv (2010) and Super Hexagon (2012) with soundtracks that draw directly on the early home computing and console instrumentation and form. In doing so, they demonstrate their own fandom, as well as a desire to draw on the distinctive aesthetics of early gaming and their association with an era of putatively simple yet unabashedly complex gameplay. We further note exhaustive online archival collections such as the HVSC (High Voltage SID Collection) or VGMrips that gather together music files extracted from original game code.

In video games, music (in particular that which is considered ‘the score’) is automatically thought of as a fundamental requirement of the identity of any production. However, in this chapter I will discuss how musical scores are often over-relied upon, formulaic and also, conceivably in some game titles, not required at all.

Chapter 27 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in modern Greece, examining figures such as Odysseus Elytis, Panayis Lekatsas, Sotiris Kakisis, Dimitrios Gouzelis, Eugenios Voulgaris, Anthimos Gazis, Ioannis Kakridis, Sappho Leontias, Pierre Louÿs, Kostas Varnalis, Nikos Kazantzakis, Myrtiotissa.

Chiptune is an underground – and very distinctive – style of lo-fi electronic music that grew from the first generations of video game consoles and home computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the years, the style has grown in popularity to become the chipscene, a vibrant community of practitioners and fans who create, distribute and consume chip music.

Among the many accolades that critics bestow on Catullus, one is often absent: metrical revolutionary. This is strange, for we know of no other Roman poet who combined so many poetic forms across so many genres for so many purposes. In what, by other standards, was a brief poetic career – perhaps not even a decade long – we find no fewer than fourteen different metrical forms, two of which may well have been his own innovation. And far from this being an incoherent medley of disparate metres for variety’s sake, it emerges as a coherent and inventive collection curated by a masterful hand. The purpose of this chapter is to survey the range of Catullus’ deployment of metrical forms and to demonstrate the nuanced flair of his practice.

Chapter 4 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho surveys Sappho’s relationship with archaic epic poetry, in particular the Iliad and Odyssey, and examines the extent to which similarities of language and theme should be regarded as deliberate borrowings as opposed to the employment of motifs and ideas common to the archaic Greek poetic tradition.

Though video game music is a distinct type of music for the moving image, game music does not exist in isolation. It engages with a huge range of contextual issues. That includes other musical traditions and styles, especially when it borrows, or draws inspiration from, pre-existing music. Beyond (or sometimes through) musical citation and allusion, video game music is also inevitably connected to social and cultural concerns.

Video game music has been permeating popular culture for over forty years, at least since the titular aliens of Space Invaders arrived in 1978, accompanied by an ever-accelerating musical ostinato. Now, reaching hundreds of millions of listeners, game music has grown to encompass a diverse spectrum of musical materials and practices. Its instrumentation ranges from orchestras to rock bands, its contexts from bedroom televisions to concert halls, its materials from ‘art music’ to Top-40 pop, and its systems from generative music technologies to carefully handcrafted idiosyncratic musical structures.