The Greeks had a word, ekphrasis, for the description of pictures, but none for writing about those other images we make, in sound.

We cannot say what music is. Yet we are verbal creatures, and strive with words to cast a net around it, knowing most of this immaterial stuff will evade capture.

Description invariably becomes commentary, invoking previous experience of works and performers as well as more general notions of style and, at the abstract horizon, ideas about music's fundamental nature, its possibilities and purposes. For the professional writer, the response—the net throw—has to be made in public, and this introduces other considerations: of language, of the limits of the personal, of morality, and indeed of the pressing need to come up with what is, in the newspaper world, aptly called a ‘story’.

The stories that follow cover a wide range of events over a period of great change. Yet the net's aim was always the same, to catch the substance of things heard.

What is heard is not the same as what is performed. A recording may perpetuate the latter, but only written testimony can tell us how music sounded at the time, how it felt and how it was understood. The history of listening depends on such testimony; the furtherance of listening, and of music, is rooted in that history. In this is the justification for the present volume, selected from a bulk of material ten times greater in size, produced for newspapers and magazines in just over thirty years.