The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.

Extending several of the themes explored previously (especially in Chapters 3 and 12), this chapter explores the notion of game-playing (in the widest sense) and its incidence on the conception and reception of Renaissance polyphony. Topics include: hexachord pieces and games involving specifically musical device (e.g. ostinato); pitch-related games, especially cadence; fugal and non-fugal canons; Augenmusik and visual puzzles or paradoxes; and the relationship between music and number. The question to whom these games were directed, and to what end, surfaces once again. It is proposed that much in Renaissance polyphony that was regarded by critics of later periods as self-indulgently abstract or abstruse is attributable to this ludic quality, which was ‘lost in translation’, particularly by writers of the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Yet again, listeners are encouraged to consider what lies beyond the sound-image of Renaissance music, thus deepening their appreciation of the music.

This chapter is the first of three that set out the basic building blocks of musical syntax in Renaissance music, beginning with those connected to pitch. The first section sets out the key concepts of music theory dating back to the time of Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, whose pertinence endures into the Renaissance (thus, the gamut, mode, the species of fourth and fifth, the so-called Guidonian Hand, and the hexachord). The next section lays out the complex (and at time fraught) relationship between these concepts and composed polyphony, laying bare in particular the tension between modes (which were initially adapted from Greek theory to classify plainchant) and polyphony. This is seen most obviously in the functioning of the most fundamental element of counterpoint, the cadence. The chapter concludes by considering other key elements of pitch-treatment, including musica ficta, dissonance treamtment, and enhanced or expanded chromatic practice.