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Henry Purcell's songs appear in vocal recitals. This chapter mentions only the better-known music, but there are equal treasures that until quite lately have lain hidden in manuscripts. The Purcell Society has at last almost completed its labours, carried on by the devotion of a few experts who gave their scanty leisure to the work and were entirely neglected by the State or the public. These programmes, to which this book refers, are to be welcomed and commended as offering, during the Festival of Britain, a wide range of music rarely heard that will demonstrate the power, vitality, and originality of one of Britain's greatest composers.

In connection with the cavity quantum electrodynamics, this chapter reviews the optical properties of a few mode semiconductor microcavity with embedded quantum dots. Both the weak (Purcell effect) and strong (polariton effect) coupling limits of microcavity single-mode light ‘quantum dot’ interaction are discussed. The experimental realization of the strong coupling limit is illustrated for a high-quality (high-Q) GaAs-based pillar microcavity.

This chapter describes the optical properties of planar microcavities in the weak coupling regime, and reviews the emission of light from microcavities in the linear regime. The derivation of the Purcell effect and stimulated emission of radiation by microcavities are presented, and the concept of lasing is introduced. Finally, the nonlinear optical properties of weakly coupled microcavities are considered, and the functionality of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) is described.

This chapter looks at American composer Daniel Felsenfeld’s Annus Mirabilis (2007). From a wide choice of Felsenfeld’s varied works, this short, witty, and oddly poignant setting of the well-known Philip Larkin poem is a real find and an especially welcome addition to the limited repertoire for bass voice. It is ideal for histrionically gifted performers wishing to enliven a recital programme of more serious fare. Felsenfeld neatly captures the painfully ironic, rueful essence of the text, and, in incongruous parody, draws on quotations from Purcell as well as two of the Beatles’ hits. Also an experienced writer, he obviously relishes supplying pithy notes for the performers, such as ‘with overdone pathos’, ‘melodramatically grand’, and ‘eerily strict’. The piano takes a major role, veering from baroque gestures and direct quotes to bravura gestures, amid constantly changing tempos and frequent rubato.

Michael Purcell argues that “Human life is meaningful… we are entered into a world in which there is already meaning”. This same life, he says, can seem evacuated of meaning. Ethical responsibility is possible only in the midst of the withdrawal of God. But the doctrine of Incarnation in the Christian faith seems to suggest precisely the opposite: it is the sign of a God who comes to meet us, not the other way around. Hence, one wonders if the notion of “God's purposeful withdrawal” is in the end compatible with or helpful in expressing Christian faith. The coincidence of opposites — God's presence and innocent suffering — is in fact coincidence and not contradiction after all. And this is, as Purcell claims, a scandal. The scandal of the cross is the manifestation of God as weakness, as lament. Insofar as justice seeks to end suffering, it is doomed to fail. In the world as we know and experience it, love is forever touched by suffering.

This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that triggers a response of mourning. Instead, it argues that “tragic drama” employs allegorical modes together with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. In challenging and expanding Benjamin's notions of the genre, the chapter examines John Ford's The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that is replete with the accoutrements of death consistent with Benjamin's description of the Trauerspiel. Through a detailed reading of Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689), however, it also illustrates how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. Thus, the experience of tragic drama is aligned with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.

This chapter states that orchestral or symphonic music occupies a no less charged place in the history of Shakespearean transmission and reception. It alternates between figures as seemingly removed from each other as Henry Purcell and Hans Werner Henze in addressing, among other kinds of classical music, the sonata, film music and the symphonic poem and in exploring why particular plays are the recurring targets of musical treatment. Shakespeare's plays and the tripartite structure of the sonata form provide Henze with the backbone, the musical and literary vertebrae, of his rich artistic response. It is seen that music frequently offers motifs to signify or suggest particular characters. As the twenty-first century dawned, classical music had become a reliable shorthand signifier in the Shakespearean canon in its own right, testimony, were it needed, to the longevity and importance of the relationship between the two art-forms.

In addition to London commercial theatres, audiences enjoyed dramatic performances performed by strolling companies at local fairs, provincial inns, and in private performance. Dublin’s theatre at Smock Alley offered recent and classical plays. In England, both boys’ and girls’ schools included original performances as part of their curriculum, including interludes and operas that were later done on the professional stage.

The Restoration brought a determination to revive the Elizabethan choral tradition of the cathedrals. There followed a second ‘golden age’ culminating in the work of Henry Purcell. The characteristic forms of anthem, service, responses, and chants were maintained, but the Hanoverian succession led to a decline in choral standards and a relatively undistinguished period of cathedral music. Meanwhile, parish churches relied chiefly on metrical psalms, sung in town churches by schoolchildren with organ accompaniment, and in country parishes by voluntary choirs and bands, often located in the west gallery. Anglican music was a powerful magnet for missions abroad. It also assisted many charities at home, such as the Foundling and Lock Hospitals. The growing number of choral festivals was a crowning expression of Anglican culture. They were also the seedbed for Handel’s oratorios. His many anthems and Te Deums celebrating special events set a new standard for Anglican ceremonial music.

This chapter explores the “paradox” and “difference” of text setting in Peter Grimes. It argues that any of Britten's incongruities of textual-vocal manner in the 1940s are in fact remnants of Purcell's influence—an influence the composer happily acknowledged, if in uncertain terms, but one that has gone largely unrecognized.

Discovery of a letter about “Harry’s” music “made” for a ball at Josias Priest’s Chelsea boarding school has reopened questions about the relationship of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to Priest’s establishment. As scholars have noted, the performance of Dido at Priest’s school was not unusual; other works, including Thomas Duffett’s Beauties Triumph (1676) and John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1684), were also performed at Chelsea. This essay both contextualizes these famous examples and moves beyond them, as I consider the interaction of pedagogical space with cultural product, mapping the geography of schoolgirl operatic performance in England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Boarding schools, designed to train young ladies in the so-called ornamental arts, often were located in repurposed manor houses (aligning the schools with money and privilege). Because of their proximity to urban centers, these institutions had access to or were actually run by a person with close ties to a professional musician, dancer, or other stage professional. The performances given at schools occupied an interstitial space, belonging neither to the public stage, nor being entirely private.

In the 1830s, the population of Ohio was much more diverse than was that of Massachusetts. For the most part, school reformers in both states came from a white, Protestant, English-speaking majority and did little to look beyond their narrow cultural horizons when advocating educational change. In Ohio, however, groups that fell outside of this majority were larger and could more feasibly, although not always successfully, engage the debate about school reform. This chapter highlights the way three such groups, African Americans, Germans, and Catholics, interacted with the Common School Awakening, illustrating how their objections to the key assumptions of the awakening adumbrated larger weaknesses that would eventually undermine this educational reform movement.

Led by the perspectives of eco-criticism and climate science, this chapter approaches King Arthur through its famous masque, the Frost Scene, which the evil Saxon wizard Osmond conjures in the war between pagan Saxons and Arthur’s Christian Britons. The masque crystallises a set of moral, cultural, and political associations hitherto unexplored in Dryden’s work around cold, ice, winter, and the far North in opposition to the warmth of temperate zones and of mercy. At the end of a century of severe winters and increasing interest in the nature of cold, and performed while William III led England to war in Europe, King Arthur demonises cold and war, characterising obliquely the national climate of war as an unnatural inversion of what Dryden had earlier celebrated as his former patron Charles II’s warmly civilising rule as ‘Royal Husbandman’. Not Arthur’s swordplay but the spirit Philidel’s discriminating vision and capacity for tender pity at human suffering represent the useful heroism in an ‘armed winter’.

This chapter shows how one early European opera, Nahum Tate's and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, reflects the period's growing discomfort over epic mythmaking. Taking up the chaste Dido tradition, Dido and Aeneas explores the Virgilian epic's lost voices. It exposes the mechanics of political myths, the process by which both artists and their political masters recast history in their own ideological image. It finds charismatic authority not in the figure of the ancient bard but in a heroine whose good name has been suppressed by Virgil's imperial fiction. But in transferring the ancient mystique of the epic poet's voice to that of his slandered queen, Dido struggles to come to grips with the meaning of this shadowy figure from the past and her enigmatic vocality.

Chapter 15 derived the fundamental theory and eigenstates for the quantized radiation field and then showed how the quantum vacuum gives rise to spontaneous emission. This chapter now goes more deeply into the meaning and implications of the quantized field. The polarization of a photon can be used as a qubit and the photonic qubit is called a flying qubit. It enables transmission of information from one node to another. Spontaneous emission is shown to enable creation of an entangled state between a photonic qubit and the spin of an electron. Spontaneous emission can also degrade the performance of some device designs and in other devices it can enhance performance such as for a single photon emitter. In this we show how to engineer the vacuum to control spontaneous emission.

Previous chapters discussed the crystal structure and bandstructure of III–V semiconductors. This chapter shifts to the book’s second major topic: electronic interactions with light. It introduces the main ideas about how light waves propagate in semiconductor crystals and induce absorption, spontaneous emission, and stimulated emission in bulk semiconductors. It also considers the differences between the electronic interactions with light in zinc-blende and wurtzite crystals and what happens as the energy gap of the semiconductor is reduced to zero or when the crystal is two-dimensional.

The model of a cavity-enclosed 2-state atom with transition frequency near resonant with a cavity mode is introduced. For conditions where their coupling dominates the Jaynes–Cummings model is described. Rabi flopping of energy between atom’s excited state and the cavity mode is recounted. Hybrid states and the AC Stark effect are discussed. Experiments with Rydberg atoms revealing the quantum nature of the cavity-atom state are discussed. Then mechanisms for trapping ions are outlined and the use of a single mercury ion as the pendulum of an optical clock is described. This relies on shelving to make non-demolition measurements on the ion. Then the measurement of (g-2) for the electron using an electron in a Penning trap is related. The quantity of interest, is the difference between the cyclotron and spin precession frequencies: its measurement by a different non-demolition technique is detailed. Finally the Purcell effect is presented, by which the lifetime of an atomic state in a cavity can be shortened or lengthened.

From its earliest formulations in writings on music, triple meter has held a special position. Conceptions of triple meter as the perfect mode of temporal division gave way during the sixteenth century to conceptions of triple meter grounded in a basic inequality, connected to the construction of the unequal tactus or battuta. While duple meters consisted of a lowering and raising of the hand that were equal in length, triple meters consisted of a lowering of the hand that was double the length of the following raise. An unequal meter, triple meter was similar in nature to the unbalanced meters in five or seven with which we are familiar today. This chapter revitalizes an unequal conceptualization of triple meter and brings this consideration to bear in analyses of Schein, Susato, Gervaise, Purcell, and Handel.