The summative discussion opens with the dethronement of major music impresario and last King of Lucknow, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the canonical treatises his chief rabab player Basit Khan took with him into exile in 1856. I then synthesise the findings of the previous chapters to explore the reasons why both colonial and Indian/mixed-race figures wrote about music during this transitional period. For the coloniser, I argue, the reasons were a hunger to collect the auditory picturesque and, later, to control musical communities. Mughal writers, in contrast, were grappling with significant change as well as trying to mitigate the loss those changes threatened to their beloved musical culture. I conclude with the aftermath of the devastating 1857 Uprising as the reason we have forgotten these musicians and their writings, and point to the lingering echoes of the late Mughal in the classical music of today.

I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.

This chapter uses the 1808 publication of Hannah More’s unlikely best-seller, the novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife to explore the ways that Romantic authors responded to heightened competition by writing novels that they identify as explicitly ephemeral – works intended to be read and relevant in their contemporary moment rather than valued in posterity. Within two years of Coelebs’ publication, other authors had produced at least six full-length response novels, which imitated, continued, parodied, or mocked the original work. The authors of these works embrace the idea of literary production as time-sensitive and transient: rather than fearing or fighting the phenomenon, they capitalize on the fast-paced literary culture of the time to emphasize their own works’ timeliness and contemporary relevance. If there are too many books, one must read and write faster; by the same token, however, the less time on the public stage each individual book demands, the more the field is opened for even greater numbers of novels.

The introduction argues that ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and ephemerality inherent in mortality. It stresses the fact that these poems have assumed at least two forms of materiality: one in relation to performing bodies and another as inscribed texts. After reviewing prior scholarship in these areas, it looks at definitions of the body and the word ephêmeros in Greek poetry, including Homer, Pindar, and other lyric poets, and in Ps.-Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, before offering summaries of the chapters of the book.

Ch 3: The third chapter concerns pleasure and happiness conveyed by a brief moment in time. Ronsard’s hedonistic poem uses dialectical reasoning and rhetorical deliberation to perfect the pleasure that is ephemeral. It is because the pleasure does not last that it becomes an absolute imperative; the pleasure of the moment is not viewed as lesser than the happiness conferred in duration. In the Princesse de Clèves, a scene of mutual pleasure taken by the protagonist and her beloved is reduced to a series of statements of causation, submitted to intense pressure of time, and turns out to be the only “pure” joy the protagonist feels throughout the novel. Baudelaire’s famous “À une passante,” an example of the new urban lyric, ironizes the lyric tradition while similarly proposing the ephemeral as the source of perfect pleasure.