There’s a wonderful double-exposure photograph of Nikola Tesla, at the very end of the 19th century, seated in his laboratory reading a book as electricity arcs wildly about him. It reminds me of my first experience of the What Is Music? festival in Melbourne, at the very end of the 20th, where, among 30 or so others standing back to moderate the blasting wall of sound from whichever experimentalists were testing the limits of the PA, a young woman chose to sit on a wooden chair close to the stage and read a paperback.