Following the Second World War, the West – especially the United States – experienced a period of sustained economic growth. In tandem, birth rates peaked such that by the mid-1950s, a strong youth culture began to take shape, fueling a great expansion of mass media. Television, radio, movies, and music became increasingly ubiquitous elements of society as consumers, especially young consumers, sought ways to spend their leisure time and disposable income. This cultural sea change engendered a revolution in musical style, with rock and roll – or simply “rock” as it later became known – emerging as a dominant force in popular music.

The premiere of the Ring and the opening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 was the most significant European cultural event of the later nineteenth century. The idea of a festival after the model of classical Greek theatre was integral to the Ring. Performances were to be given free of charge under ideal conditions in a temporary theatre constructed for the purpose in a location away from the corrupting influence of modern industrial civilisation. The festival idea as finally realized was, however, far removed from the utopian ideals of the original conception. The scale and practical demands of Wagner’s enterprise forced him to compromise with shifting political paradigms and harsh economic reality. The first Bayreuth Festival thus became a meeting place not for Wagner’s classless society dedicated to the ideals of art, but of aristocracies and plutocratic elites. The democratic festival, originally conceived in the white heat of revolutionary fervour, became a symbol of artistic hegemony and the aggrandisement of the newly founded German Reich. The resulting artistic, cultural and highly potent political legacy was to extend far beyond the historical context in which the festival first came about.

In the years since its inception, Wagner’s Ring has generated significant commentary and controversy. Critics of the Ring asserted its influence in public discourse (beyond music criticism of the work and its performances) and generated ambitious intellectual and ideological debates about art, society, and politics. This chapter charts some milestones in these debates, including the contributions of well-known thinkers such as Nietzsche, Shaw, and Adorno, but also some of their French, German, or Russian contemporaries whose influence has waned since the fin de siècle. In the twentieth century, seminal musicological approaches emerged that transcend analytical-technical matters, such as Alfred Lorenz’s ideologically charged investigations of Wagnerian form or Richard Donington’s psychoanalytic explanations. More recently the task of interpreting the Ring has shifted from the written word to the operatic stage, where directors explore and expose its various and conflicting layers of meaning. Whether formulated by philosophers, writers, musicologists, or artists, two basic approaches emerge from these interpretations: They either develop a social or political interpretation from the Ring outward, or they insert the tetralogy into a preexisting worldview.

This chapter gives an overview of the development of lexicography in New Zealand before and after the publication of the landmark Dictionary of New Zealand English in 1997. Attention is given to the importance of the Maori language in New Zealand English and the ways in which slang has been over-emphasised as a characteristic of this variety of English. As well as monolingual English dictionaries, the chapter includes some discussion of dictionaries in New Zealand's two official languages, Maori and New Zealand Sign Language.

The specters of Nazism and the Holocaust loom over Wagner’s Ring cycle. In the first half of this chapter, I consider whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism is present in the Ring – whether the Nibelung dwarves Alberich and Mime are meant to be caricatures of Jews. I conclude that the Nibelungs’ physical appearance, behavior, language and music took on aspects that Wagner found repellent about Jews, but that our deep unease about the relationship between the Germanic hero Siegfried and the dwarf Mime has much to do with our post-Holocaust symbolic landscape. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the Ring’s broader role in the Third Reich. Hitler was a committed Wagnerite, and the Nazi regime made plentiful use of Wagnerian music, motifs and stagecraft, but the connections between Wagner, Hitler, and Nazism are not straightforward, and must be traced back to the Wagner cult amongst German speakers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wagner’s Ring was not the ideological wellspring of Nazism, yet I argue that the impact of the composer’s work on Hitler did play a role in shaping the Führer’s – and thus Germany’s – political destiny.

In early modern Europe, international communication in Latin was increasingly counterbalanced by the growth of language contact and exchange among Europeans who favoured the vernacular languages over the classical ones. Not surprisingly, this resulted in the production of dictionaries, initially bilingual and polyglot, and later monolingual, of a large number of languages. Given this context, this chapter studies how the English language and English lexicography were slowly involved in the development of the European tradition of dictionary-making. A number of polyglot, bilingual, and trilingual dictionaries are surveyed in order to show their reciprocal influences and the Continental impact on English dictionaries: in fact, polyglot dictionaries grew out of bilingual ones, bilingual dictionaries were made into trilingual ones, the wordlists of monolingual dictionaries were sometimes taken from bilingual ones, etc. It will also be shown how a few monolingual English dictionaries were related, directly or otherwise, to Continental sources. The chapter will finally focus on Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in order to highlight how it was influenced by Continental models and how, in turn, it exerted its influence on European lexicography.

One of the defining aspects of music is that it exists in time. From clapping to dancing, toe-tapping to head-nodding, the responses of musicians and listeners alike capture the immediacy and significance of the musical beat. The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm explores the richness of musical time through a variety of perspectives, surveying influential writings on the topic, incorporating the perspectives of listeners, analysts, composers, and performers, and considering the subject across a range of genres and cultures.

The only “dose of theoretical study” swallowed by the young Richard Wagner was “about half-a-year’s formal training in harmony and counterpoint in the ‘strict style,’” administered in 1831–2 by Theodor Weinlig of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. Earlier, “instruction in the fundamentals of harmony from a member of the Leipzig theatre orchestra. Gottfried Müller, achieved little, as the pupil was too much immersed in the fantastic musical realm of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler and the Fantasiestücke to submit to the sober rigors of conventional theory.”

This chapter traces the development of monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLD) from their genesis in the 1930s through their current internet editions. Starting from the pioneering work of West, Palmer, and Hornby, it shows how the aim of enabling learners to read and write English effectively informed the developing content of MLDs, from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s through the Longman, Collins, Cambridge, Macmillan, and American Merriam-Webster dictionaries. The introduction of explicit information on grammatical and lexical patterning including collocations and idioms, the use of a limited defining vocabulary, the use of a computer corpus of texts, and the inclusion of frequency information all contributed to the profile of the MLD as it is known today. Increasing concern for accessibility has influenced both the layout of dictionary entries and the presentation of word senses in longer entries, with the use of guide words and menus. The chapter ends with a brief review of the benefits and challenges of migrating MLDs to the electronic medium, especially the Internet.

This chapter considers the appearance of the first monolingual dictionary of English at the beginning of the seventeenth century and its forebears in the late sixteenth century. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, a so-called ‘hard words’ dictionary, was first published in 1604, and was preceded by a list published as an addendum to the main predecessor, Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister of 1596. Cawdrey’s work was addressed to a clientele which was literate but less than fully educated, and in particular, women who were sufficiently educated to teach others, especially in their own households, and to promulgate a religious agenda. Coote’s book was essentially a teaching manual aimed not merely at students, but at the teachers themselves, and was based on a clearly articulated method. These two dictionaries have a close relationship, Cawdrey employing a large percentage of Coote’s entries. This chapter explores that relationship in detail. While many entries are taken over largely unaltered, there are also numerous changes, including expansions, the provision of explanatory material, and new definitions. There are also many deletions from Coote, and the incorporation of terms from other works.

Allusions to and citations of Richard Wagner abound in popular culture, but allusions to the Ring cycle are uniquely fraught. They assume some familiarity with a monumental work that resists easy pop cultural grinding up. This chapter traces different strategies employed by writers, performers, directors, and film composers to engage, whether humorously or seriously, with a work that is as difficult to cite as it is tempting to make grist for the pop-cultural mill.

My first encounter with what has come to be known as minimalist music was at a rehearsal of Steve Reich’s iconic composition, Drumming, in his downtown New York City loft in the early spring of 1971. Reich was still composing the piece and was teaching it to the assembled musicians by rote. Two pianists, a woodwind player, and Reich – the only one of the four with percussion training – were playing on a line of eight stand-mounted bongo drums and striking them with wooden timbale sticks. Normally, drummers play on one pair of tightly tuned bongos with their hands and they hold the drums between their knees, so I was surprised to see four pairs of bongos, tuned to precise pitches, being played in this manner. However, my surprise turned to curiosity, and even a touch of bewilderment, when I watched and heard what they were playing on these drums.

This chapter discusses the current role of natural language processing in lexicography, and considers how this might change in the future. It first considers the shared history of natural language processing and lexicography with respect to statistical methods. It then discusses how natural language processing is applied to pre-process corpora to support lexicographic analysis, identify collocations in corpora, automatically construct thesauri, and select good dictionary examples. It also discusses the natural language processing tasks of word sense disambiguation and induction and their relationship to lexicography, and very recent neural network-based methods for automatically generating definitions. It concludes by discussing specialised types of dictionaries that can currently be automatically constructed, and considers whether dictionary construction could ever be fully automated.

As long as the human race keeps going, there can be no end to rhythm: we will always need to place events in musical time. It is unlikely that a drone music monoculture will hold static sway for future millennia or take over all perpetuity; humanity’s hyperactive search for meaning needs more reactionary pacing and diversity. Yet while there should be no dispute that there is a future for rhythm, the contents of that future are inevitably impossible to predict, this being the only accurate prediction in the field of futurology. The present chapter will attempt to extrapolate a few current trends and anticipate interesting and, it is hoped, inspiring scenarios but acknowledges the dangers of dropping a crystal ball on our dancing feet. I proceed by considering the space of possible rhythms, the limits of human production of rhythm, the transformation of rhythm through technological means, and the latest repercussions of artificial intelligence technology on rhythmic practice.

The remarkable facility in rhythmic play demonstrated by musicians and dancers throughout the Indian subcontinent is as impressive as it can be bewildering for the listener. From local and regional practices, through devotional and popular genres, to the heavily theorized concert traditions of the North (Hindustani music) and South (Karnatak music), rhythmic complexity abounds. A performance may begin without even a pulse, where melodies seem to float unpredictably in musical space. Yet increasing rhythmic regularity leads to the establishment of repetitive sequences of beats, both evenly and unevenly distributed, which provide the frameworks for elaborate melodic and rhythmic compositions, variations, and improvisations. The entrance of drums – also essentially melodic in their subtle manipulations of pitch, timbre, stress, and resonance – is invariably a moment of great visceral as well as intellectual excitement. Together, singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and drummers build their performances around the anchors provided by the beats; they subdivide these beats in myriad ways, playing with different rhythmic densities and syncopations. The thrilling, rapidly articulated sequences with their offbeat stresses can temporarily disorient the listener until all seems to resolve in a triumphant convergence of surface rhythm and target beat. The rhythmic system as a whole and the individual frameworks of beats that serve to organize rhythmic expression are known as tala.

Early eighteenth-century dictionaries departed from the hard-word tradition to include common words for a wider and expanding audience. Bailey s dictionaries (1721, 1730) provided comprehensive coverage of information of all kinds, not only linguistic, but were found lacking in clarity and lexicographic sophistication. Increasing desire for an authoritative standard for the language prompted Johnson s work on his dictionary of 1755. In this dictionary, he raised the standards of lexicography in regard to definitions (especially multiple ones), phrasal verbs, and other aspects, including the illustration of usage through the use of written authorities; however, he abandoned his hopes and intentions of fixing the language (prescriptivism) in the midst of his work, turning to a more descriptive model of English written usage. The change in method and approach occurred after the failure of his attempts to order literary and other written material he consulted into pre-ordained structures of definition. Concerns for proper speaking and spelling became louder throughout the century, because of the rapidly increasing and increasingly mobile population, as well as the Act of Union of 1707, uniting England and Scotland. Dictionary makers increasingly included guides to pronunciation and spelling in reaction to these concerns, and numerous pronouncing dictionaries appeared from mid-century onwards.