Introduction Friedemann Sallis and Patricia Hall; 1. Sketches and sketching Giselher Schubert and Friedemann Sallis; 2. Preliminaries before visiting an archive Ulrich Mosch; 3. Archival etiquette Therese Muxeneder; 4. Coming to terms with the composer's working manuscripts Friedemann Sallis; 5. The classification of musical sketches exemplified in the catalogue of the Archivio Luigi Nono Erika Schaller; 6. Digital preservation of archival material William Koseluk; 7. Transcribing sketches Regina Busch; 8. A tale of two sketchbooks: reconstructing and deciphering Alban Berg's sketchbooks for Wozzeck Patricia Hall; 9. 'Written between the desk and the piano': dating Béla Bartók's sketches László Somfai; 10. Defining compositional process: idea and instrumentation in Igor Stravinsky's Ragtime (1918) and Pribaoutki (1915) Tomi Mäkelä; 11. Floating hierarchies: organisation and composition in works by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen during the 1950s Pascal Decroupet; 12. Elliot Carter's sketches: spiritual exercises and craftsmanship Denis Vermaelen; 13. E-Sketches: Brian Ferneyhough's use of computer assisted compositional tools Ross Feller; 14. John Cage's Williams Mix (1951-3): the restoration and new realizations of and variations on the first octophonic, surround-sound tape composition Larry Austin; Appendix. Select list of institutions housing manuscript collections of twentieth-century composers.