In November 1619 Francesco Dognazzi, maestro di cappella to the Duke of Mantua whose forebears had been Monteverdi's employers, arrived in Venice (see Monteverdi's letter of 8 March 1620). When Santi Orlandi, who had been in charge of music at the Gonzaga court, had died in the previous July, Monteverdi had been invited to return to the Duke's service. In Venice, where rumours of Monteverdi's departure from his post at S. Marco were already rife, Dognazzi's mission was to advance the cause of a return to Mantua. In this he failed. Writing to Alessandro Striggio, a Mantuan court secretary who had been Monteverdi's librettist for Orfeo, Monteverdi enumerated some of his reasons for staying in Venice:

Psychology provides an important base from which to understand music, and is very relevant for electronic music in particular, where psychological theories have even inspired new compositional explorations. Furthermore, in analysing and composing electronic music, traditional music theory is often not applicable. There is no conventional score available on which the analysis of the music could be based, for the music does not rest solely on certain standard notated pitch structures and rhythmic frameworks, but encompasses timbre, spatialisation and other general auditory parameters. An appreciation of the role of aural cognition is vital for a true engagement with this field, where any sounding object is fair game.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to perceptual and cognitive processes of music that are fundamental for understanding electronic music. The chapter begins with a discussion of the neuroscientific basis of the auditory system. This is followed by a discussion of low-level phenomena of audition, including the localisation of sound sources, masking, auditory stream segregation and the perception of timbre. Next, the perception of pitch is tackled, with a discussion on its relation to alternative tunings. Finally, basic notions of rhythm perception are introduced. For each of these parts, electronic music examples illustrating the perceptual principles will be given. Any and all principles expounded in this chapter might be taken up and profitably investigated by electronic musicians.

A virtuoso craftsman, Auden is also a poet who communicates a strong sense of an idiosyncratic personal voice. Yet this voice can seem enigmatic in its inflections. In what follows, I shall examine and compare a range of poems from his 1930s work (the term covers poems composed between 1928 and 1939) to examine three issues: whether we can see Auden as maturing beyond or falling away from his early, electrifying stylistic brilliance; whether behind the deft stylist there is a poetic sensibility capable of engagement with his subjects; and whether Auden's poetry conforms to his pronouncement in his 'Introduction' to The Poet's Tongue that 'Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.'

In making that statement, Auden was judiciously asserting his freedom from agitprop ideas of art common in the 1930s, a period remarkable for its political consciousness, its sense that poetry must engage with the pressing realities of its time. Out of the window goes the High Modernist longing, beyond any fragments shored against ruins, for a vanished ideal of aesthetic and political order; in comes a feeling that the true matter for art is the state of society and the individual's relationship with the social. Long gone is 'the Poet's Party', as Auden calls it in part 3 of his witty pastiche-cum-tribute, 'Letter to Lord Byron', a party marked by its elitist disregard for 'all those cattle'; instead, as the party gives way to the hangover (of which the First World War and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 might be regarded as cataclysmic symptoms), 'the sobering few / Are trying hard to think of something new'.

Over the past four decades, David Hare has accompanied his work in theatre with a broad spectrum of other kinds of public intervention. These include his early reviews for the theatre magazine Plays and Players in the late 1960s, his plethora of articles and interviews, his contribution to platform discussions, the prefaces to his published plays, his diary on acting and, most distinctively, the virtuoso lectures and speeches that he has given with increasing frequency, in a variety of speaking contexts, since the late 1970s. Without doubt, Hare's public speaking has functioned time and again to reiterate and elaborate his sense of the purpose and ethical value of theatre in changing political contexts; this, in turn, has helped to fashion his stature as public figure and latter-day 'man of letters' in the tradition of Bernard Shaw and John Osborne.

This essay attempts to fathom the relationship between Hare’s playwrighting and his non-theatrical work, exploring how the latter has expressed a unified set of preoccupations about the nature of his theatre’s engagement with historical and contemporary political realities. Our aim is to examine that which is both notable and intriguing about Hare’s numerous commentaries on performance: namely, the sharply anti-theatrical rhetoric that permeates many of his speech acts. Our hypothesis is that Hare’s long-standing commitment to the pure, transparent and direct communication of subject matter in performance has led to his increasing discomfiture with the mediating discourses of theatre and, consequently, to his reification of the lecture format as the preferred mode of public address both on and off the stage.

Imagine being enraptured at the performance of a hotly tipped band, ‘The Alan Turing Five’, an epic fusion of thrash drumming, vocoded belting and virtuosic three-fingered guitar playing evoking a longing for a bygone age. Yet after the show, an ugly rumour spreads amongst the audience that even leads once-satisfied punters to demand their money back. All the personalities you observed on stage were really robot simulacra; no wonder they played so fast!

Is this tale so far-fetched? The work of the great French engineer Vaucanson was introduced in chapter 1 – a modern-day version of his 1738 flute-playing automaton has been designed by researchers at Waseda University, Japan. Their Waseda Flutist Robot aims to reproduce ‘as realistically as possible, every single human organ involved in playing the flute’ (Solis et al. 2006, p. 13). Although aspects of this project formulate an acoustical enquiry, the musical applications are not forsaken: the robot has performed duets with human flautists. Indeed, this is only one of a number of such robots produced since the 1980s, and a second musical robot will be featured later in this chapter. Robotics is a boom area of the current generation, particularly in Japan, and androids (humanoid robots) are even being given soft silicone skin and affective (emotional) responses. Media coverage of the 2006 International Next-Generation Robot Fair actively portrayed such uncannily realistic simulations, including the scarily lifelike Repliee Q2, an android interviewer.

From festivals and dances, through opera, theatre and shadow play, from Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), to cinema and virtual reality, the arts have often confronted the problems and potential of engaging many human senses (modalities) at once. Such multi sensory (multimodal) entertainments are often underlined by strongly traditional narratives, yet linear storytelling is not necessarily the primary concern of some alternative artistic ventures. The degree to which any of these media allows for live performance varies, and this chapter will particularly treat the circumstance where the artistic output can be influenced during the course of performance itself, rather than being cast as a fixed product prior to presentation. A parallel chapter on music for broadcast media will analyse the opposing case, where the determination of a finished product, even if subject to a deadline, can be carried out free of realtime concert constraints. Yet there will necessarily be some overlap, and this chapter will in particular treat the case of some formative historical influences on contemporary live performers including the non-realtime work of abstract film visionaries such as Oskar Fischinger. We shall further broach some of the psychological and analytical perspectives on audiovisual work.

To give an immediate example of current concerns, one contemporary manifestation of realtime performance is exhibited by club VJs – video or visual jockeys. Whilst their profile in publicity billing and on-stage position has not matched historically to that of their foils, the club DJ (disc jockey), interest in VJ practice is very much on the ascendant in the arts (Spinrad 2005; Jaeger 2005). Thetypical VJ, if suchan artist can be said to exist,will use dedicated software packages on a laptop computer, often mixed in realtime with prerecorded imagery on DVD and/or live video from a camera. The resulting imagery is centrally displayed by projector(s) in the performance environment. Frequently, analysis of the audio signal, tap tempo, or other control allows the synchronisation of visual events to music. It should be acknowledged, however, that these techniques are by no means universally performed; many VJs control all visuals manually.

Portable Theatre was formed on a hot summer day in August 1968.

We were in the small kitchen of the flat in Earlham Street, Covent Garden, which David Hare shared with two other people from Cambridge. I'd dropped in for a cup of tea. David said, 'I'm thinking of starting a theatre company; would you be interested?' I didn't say yes immediately. He brought the tea across and I looked at the radio sitting on the shelf by the sink. I said, 'We could call it Portable Theatre. You know . . . pick it up, put it down.' Then we sat down and wrote a press release, the gist of which was that, after a certain modest reluctance, we had succumbed to the pleas of assorted theatrical luminaries and started an exciting new theatre company: Portable Theatre. We also wrote two letters asking for what would now be called sponsorship, for the two items we felt we'd need: a van and an electric typewriter. I knew from being in bands we'd need a van, and in those pre-photocopying days we needed an electric typewriter to cut the stencils to Roneo the scripts. What these scripts might be, we hadn't a clue. In one of the first of a series of lucky breaks, Olympia gave us a typewriter and Volkswagen gave us an extraordinarily generous discount on a camper van.

Electronic music is the mainstream. From musique concrète to audiovisual sampling, from elektronische musik to minimal techno, from the Telharmonium to the laptop, electrical technology has facilitated more than a century of original music, spawning a multitude of new styles, instruments and methods. Fruitful crossovers with other media and arts have allowed it to reach new audiences and to become an accomplice in many forms of expression. It appears ubiquitous, from mobile phones, television and podcasts to the art gallery and other unorthodox performance spaces. In many ways, electronic music is now so well accepted and integrated into contemporary practice that it is transparent to the observer. Yet on the periphery of musical exploration it remains highly visible – from sonic art, to live electronics, to new advances in computational music.

Whilst electronic music would not restrict itself to computer-mediated art, much current work in this area is related to computational applications and the boom in accessibility of home computers. The last sixty years have seen a move from rare electronic music studios to the ubiquity of bedroom studios. As if the thought experiment about Shakespearian monkeys has come true, millions of composers are at large exploring a multiplicity of software and devices in the pursuit of their own musical worlds. The entry cost of an electronic music hobby is no longer the hard graft of acoustic instrument practice, but a simple willingness to explore musical outputs within predominantly visual software paradigms. The influence of computers in compositional techniques, sound analysis and processing, performance interfaces and concert practice is astounding.

David Hare's trilogy of plays - Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993) - comprise a mid-career capstone, the culminating expression of the writer's abiding interest in private conduct and the public weal. Sweeping in scope, dialectical in tone, these works confirm Hare as one of Britain's most accomplished playwrights. If one, however, considers the drama that would soon follow on the English stage - the volatile, terse and often obscene theatre of Ravenhill, Kane, Crimp, Penhall et al. - Hare can appear rather conventional, the established writer of what Martin McDonough would describe as a 'dull and political and lecture-y' kind of drama. While comparison between Hare's work and that of the 'in-yer-face' writers reveals vast differences in style, Hare's trilogy ventures into a moral space that a dramatist such as Ravenhill might recognise and affirm. Hare's trilogy exposes a collapse in Britain's national life in the last decade of the millennium. And, like the writers of Ravenhill's generation, he interrogates the nature (and possibility) of ethical action in this world adrift.

From Monteverdi to Monteverdi

This conceit, famously coined by Nino Pirrotta, summarises a central problemraised By Monteverdi's operas: the stylistic gulf between the first, Orfeo, and the last, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea. Scholars have generally rationalised this gulf by invoking the different systems of patronage of ducal Mantua and republican Venice, where the respective works were performed, as well as the composer's own development over the course of the three and a half decades that separate them. Aside from the different circumstances surrounding the performance of the works – Orfeo was staged in a room of the ducal palace before a small group of aristocrats, while Ulisse and Poppea were produced in a public theatre before a socially mixed audience of several hundred – the composer himself had naturally matured. The sometime faithful servant of the Gonzaga household had become maestro di cappella at S. Marco, the dominant musical personality in Venetian society, a figure of enormous prestige. The change was not only psychological, of course: the late operas come after the composition of many madrigals (the Sixth to Eighth Books, published from 1614 onwards, after he had left Mantua for Venice, comprise some seventy madrigals) and a lengthy, sustained commitment to sacred music, as well as a number of smaller-scale dramatic or para-dramatic works written for private patrons.

If the era of 'postmodernity' is increasingly seen as 'a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself' then poetry produced under this new 'socio-economic mode' might rightly be dismissed as another form of 'postmodern' candyfloss neatly packaged for our quick or therapeutic consumption. On the other hand perhaps poets, often relatively uninvested in the capital of a culture industry, which is currently terming itself in its latest guise as 'postmodern', are one of the few cultural producers left who can afford to be sceptical of the current era and of the claims of culture itself. Paradoxically, this means that poetry has the potential to be the most 'postmodern' and the most 'anti-postmodern' of the arts. Anthologies of the period reflect the unease with which contemporary poets and critics have embraced and subsequently distanced themselves from such an elastic term. Although there is some overlap between poets represented in anthologies of British poetry since 1980, what is most striking is the divergence between them that marks an important and decisive split in post-war poetry in Britain. Poets from both groupings have been termed 'postmodern'.

There are clearly a number of definitions of the 'postmodern' in operation here. The first is linked to the branding, dilution (under the guise of accessibility) and commodification of intellectual and creative activity which have become key features of the 'postmodern' era. The second relates to the formal and conceptual features of 'postmodernism' as it has developed in relation to other disciplines such as architecture and the visual arts. The editors of The New Poetry (1993) describe their selection as emphasising 'accessibillity, democracy and responsiveness, humour and seriousness'.

What happened was that it became commercially possible for me to be a film director because of David Rose and Jeremy Isaacs and their patronage when they started Channel 4 in 1982. Isaacs was the Chief Executive, and Rose headed the film department. Their brief was that 'We're starting a new television channel and we want to make British films; we want to make films that look out toward British life, and which are contemporary.' I did it for as long as I could. More or less everything that was interesting on the screen in the 1970s was on television. It was not practical for us to make work for the cinema then, because there was no framework available: big British films - which were essentially aimed at the American market - had died. And then, quite simply, it was down to the genius of Isaacs and Rose, who set out to make a link between the distinguished tradition of British television plays and the cinema by nurturing writing and directing talent within the relative safety of television, then moving it on. My feeling has always been that the reason people left television was because of censorship. In the 1970s, problems of BBC censorship were very intense. The BBC was then run by establishment villains. So we all moved out to the cinema but, by and large, when I was making feature films I was working for the same person - David Rose - who had been my producer at BBC Birmingham.

Evaluating a composer's aesthetics of music and its relation to programmes is fraught with difficulties, not least because the historical meaning of aesthetics as a discipline has undergone changes since its early, 1750 definition by Alexander Baumgarten: ‘Aesthetics (a theory of liberal arts, of inferior mode of knowledge, the art of beautiful thinking, in a way analogous to thinking about reason [logic]), is the science of sensual cognition’. It was thus conceived as a philosophical category denoting the knowledge of the beautiful through the senses (a lower form of knowledge than logic, which deals with intellectual concepts). By the middle of the nineteenth century, as universalist philosophical aesthetic theories distanced themselves from professional criticism, the demise of the metaphysics of the beautiful became inevitable. Music criticism which centred more directly on the musical works themselves, and addressed more practical questions of knowledge and meaning was able to come closer to elucidating the inner workings of music, and thus became more influential in the aesthetic tastes of the time. This situation was recognized by none other than Eduard Hanslick, the aesthetician of ‘absolute music’ when he wrote in 1854: ‘Formerly, the aesthetic principles of the various arts were supposed to be governed by some supreme metaphysical principle of general aesthetics. Now, however, the conviction is daily growing that each individual art can be understood only by studying its technical limits and inherent nature.’

When Monteverdi was hired by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga to join the court musicians at Mantua, he described himself as a player of the vivuola. Yet it is obvious that he was also expected to compose, for he had already published several collections of music for three and four voices, two of which were of sacred music. Indeed, Monteverdi's very first publication, at the age of fifteen (1582), was a set of twenty-three three-voice motets, many based on antiphon texts for various of the Offces, which he entitled Sacrae cantiunculae tribus vocibus. In the very next year the young Claudio displayed his growing compositional skill by expanding his texture to four voices for a set of eleven Madrigali spirituali, only the bass voice of which survives today. It was only after these initial forays in religious music that the young composer turned his hand to three-voice secular Canzonette (1584) and his first two books of five-voice madrigals (1587 and 1590). So by the time he entered Gonzaga service, Monteverdi had already established himself as a significant composer of both sacred and secular music in northern Italy.

Only one more book of madrigals appeared during Monteverdi's first decade in Mantua (in 1592), but during that time he had already composed those madrigals on texts of Giambattista Guarini's Il pastor fido that would make him both famous and notorious because of the polemics with the conservative theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi that lasted from 1600 to 1608. Several of these madrigals were contrafacted and published with Latin spiritual texts by a Milanese rhetorician, Aquilino Coppini, in 1607. Before 1610, Monteverdi published no more sacred music, a gap of twenty-seven years from his Madrigali spirituali, yet that does not mean he was completely silent in the religious sphere during this period. Unfortunately, so much of Monteverdi’s music, especially his sacred music, was never published, and far more was lost than ever appeared in print.

‘When asked what musical instrument they play, few computer musicians respond spontaneously with “I play the computer.” Why not?’(Wessel and Wright 2002). Actually, most computer music performers still seem shyly reluctant to consider the computer as a regular musical instrument, but nonetheless, the computer is finally reaching the point of feeling as much at home on stage as a saxophone or an electric guitar. This assimilation was boosted over the last ten years with the arrival of affordable machines powerful enough for realtime audio processing and of versatile audio software such as Max/MSP, Pure Data or SuperCollider, but live computer music is far from being a novelty; computer-based realtime music systems started in the late 1960s and early 1970s and non-digital live electronic music goes back as far as the nineteenth century.

An ambitious goal for any new instrument is the potential to create a new kind of music. In that sense, baroque music cannot be imagined without the advances of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century luthiers, rock could not exist without the electric guitar, and jazz or hip-hop, without the redefinitions of the saxophone and the turntable. This chapter explores the potential of computers as musical instruments and analyses what it is that makes them so especially different from previous instruments, unveiling the novel possibilities as well as the drawbacks they entail.

Washington, Virginia, USA, 1951; the Washington Obelisk; Lincoln Memorial. A strange low pulsing sound fills the air; it has a bell-like quality. You think you recognise the swelling of a tam-tam roll, but there is also a strange low pulsing sound which does not seem to match anything you have ever heard before. As you see a bright gigantic white disc overfly the Capitol, you recognise the familiar sound of some kind of aircraft. People stop and stare at the skies. A high-pitched bleep is heard momentarily as the disc flies overhead. Now both the pulse and the flying roar seem to modulate together varying in speed and timbral colour. People run and scream as the object prepares to land and the sound becomes more intense: a strong wind, static electricity, a motor sound; all fuse in and out of a pitch-bending tonal hum. The sound of a short servomechanism punctuates the landing. It has arrived!

Within The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), the real and the imaginary become one through the magic of the soundtrack. As the film progresses, the leading musical themes are played by two Theremins. Thanks to their unfamiliarity to the listener, their characteristic gliding sound endows the music of the film with an otherworldly quality by visual association with UFO imagery. The soundtrack of the film contains, then, two main musical elements: the organisation of processed sounds to represent the noises of extraterrestrial elements and atmospheric moods, and the use of electronic instrumentation to imbue the orchestral film score with a futuristic sheen.