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Rather than attempt to mold the contents of this book into any fixed editorial style, I've preferred to treat the examples, along with their titles and tags, as primary material. Some of the examples come with text descriptions, which are mostly my own recollections of Ed's observations. Otherwise I've hewed closely to Ed's original text, all the way down to the inconsistent spellings, capitalizations, and punctuation.
A few of the examples are adapted from elsewhere: one each by Jörgen Jersild, Peter Magadini, and Arthur Weisberg (the latter for an analytical re-telling of a measure by Ralph Shapey). There are also three excerpts from Ferneyhough, including very dirty reproductions from manuscript scores. We don't yet have formal permission to reproduce these. Although they certainly fall under fair-use rules we plan to be polite and ask permission before publishing this manuscript in final form.
Many of the examples have one or more keywords, such as “Odd Evening" or simply “fun". These are collected in an index of tags so that the reader can use them to find other examples that share the same tag. In some cases the tags deserve a bit of explanation, and for these, one of the examples was selected to introduce the tag with a bit of explanatory text; these tag-explainer examples are listed first in the tag's index entry. Readers of the electronic version can click on the tags to navigate between the examples and the tag index.
In addition, many examples come with soundfiles. In the printed version there is a comment below the printed example giving the soundfile's index number; to hear it the reader will have to chase it down on a computer. If reading a digital version, it should be possible to hear the example just by clicking on the “AUDIO" link below the displayed score.
Special thanks are due to Andrew (“Drew") Allen, who developed a Pure Data patch to generate one of the examples, out of which Ed derived several related ones. Drew's patch still mostly works and once I've got it back in shape I'll distribute it.
Thanks also to Trevor Henthorn, who data-mined a massive collection of digital slide shows to extract the hundreds of images and soundfiles that made it possible to assemble this book.
—Miller Puckette
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