This book is an introduction to music sketches. Its goal is to provide the reader with the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake a study of composers’ working documents. The field of sketch studies is changing. Numerous reasons account for this. The impact of electronic technology on the composition, performance, dissemination and conservation of music, the crumbling of the Classical Canon, the weakening of the strong work concept and the concomitant rise of ‘performance studies’ are only a few of the factors that are having a strong impact on music cultures today, as well as on how we study them. Examining how music has been and continues to be composed is no exception. For scholars working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a musical sketch was some kind of handwritten document, normally consigned to staff paper. Today a musical sketch can also be data stored on magnetic tape, on a vinyl disc or in a digital device. The book is intended to prepare the reader for this rapidly evolving field.

In writing this book, I have endeavoured to strike a balance in my choice of case studies. The reader will find examples of well-known and lesser-known compositions written by the famous and the not-so-famous. Some will be disappointed to discover that the work of composers or scholars they were expecting to find is absent. In the space allotted to me, I have attempted to present a selection that judiciously covers both the time frame (ca. 1600 to the present) and the cultural contexts addressed in this book.