The roots of this study lie in the period of my doctoral studies as an Ussher fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. For three years, under the close supervision of Martin Adams, I examined various aspects of compositional technique in Purcell's fantazias and sonatas, among them symmetry, palindrome, and tonal design.

The research I conducted in Dublin toward my dissertation was intensive and the process took several surprising turns. The most significant of those surprises was my becoming acquainted with the work of Alan Howard. Howard wrote his own doctoral thesis on Purcell's compositional technique not long before I commenced my studies and, after reading his research, I realized that some of my raw ideas had already been explored, systematically and comprehensively, in Howard's dissertation. On the one hand, from that moment on, my thesis had to go in directions different from those I originally envisioned. On the other hand, my encounter with Alan and with other scholars in the field made me aware of the fact that I was starting my research into Purcell at a lucky moment when several excellent minds were working on Purcell's music. Fortunately, almost all of them were collaborative, friendly, and welcoming of new researchers and ideas. Quite a few of these scholars were also roughly my age, and so, frequent conferences and study days (during the years of my study the music world commemorated Purcell's 350th birthday, which produced several occasions to meet) made me think a lot about the differences between the field we grew into, compared to the field as it was experienced by musicologists of previous generations—those who prepared for us the critical edition, the catalogues and the seminal biographies. Even for that kind of introspective thinking about Purcellian studies I found some precedent among active scholars.

The training process of musicologists belonging to “my” generation (born in the 1970s and early 1980s) was essentially different from that of those born in the 1950s and 1960s, if only for the fact that our immediate acquaintance with Purcell's music was through recordings, the majority of which are historically informed, even if not entirely bound to musicological considerations.