Vienna's credentials as a cradle of modernism are too familiar to need rehearsing. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka conjure up a world at once iridescent and lowering, voluptuously self-indulgent and coolly analytical. Arnold Schoenberg has been accorded pride of place as Vienna's quintessential musical modernist who confronted the crisis of language and meaning by emancipating dissonance and, a decade later, installing a new serial order. It is a tidy narrative and one largely established in the years after the Second World War by a generation of students and disciples intent upon reasserting disrupted continuities. That such continuities never existed is beside the point; it was a useful and, for its time, productive revision of history because it was fuelled by the excitement of discovery.

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.

Composers, so the conventional wisdom has it, tend to be bad analysts – too ready to find things that aren't there (and to overlook or undervalue things that are), if the result will help to make their own creative preoccupations seem legitimate, important or necessary. Nor is conventional wisdom inevitably wrong on this point: as a trawl through half-a-century's worth of certain journals will speedily affirm, consciously or unconsciously self-serving 'analysis' has in some composing circles been more the rule than the exception.

The music of Egon Wellesz, largely forgotten since his death in 1974, is slowly being rediscovered. The last three years have seen the premiere of his Third Symphony in Vienna (reviewed in Tempo 213), a concert devoted to his chamber music at the Wigmore Hall, and several new recordings, among them a forthcoming release from Orfeo which will mark the first appearance on CD of any of his stage works, the 1931 opera Die Bakchantinnen.

• Basel: European Month of Music Paul Driver

• Proms 2001 (1): Beamish and others Tom Service

• Amsterdam: Knaifel's opera ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Alexander Ivashkin

• Amsterdam: John Adams's Strange Places Paul Driver

• London, Purcell Room: Errollyn Wallen Guy Rickards

• Proms 2001 (2): Goehr, Macmillan, Ruders etc Robert Stein

• Brisbane: Richard Barrett's ‘Dark Matter’ Richard Toop

• Cambridge: Tim Souster's ‘World Music’ Mark Doran

• Proms 2001 (3): Pickett and Thomas Malcolm Miller

• Wigmore Hall: Gál and Wellesz Martin Anderson

• Purcell Room: Leonard Salzedo Commemorative Concert Paul Conway

• Gloucester: Graham Whettam's Fourth Quartet Malcolm Miller

• Birmingham Conservatoire: Carl Nielsen Symposium Peter Palmer

• Alan Rawsthorne profiled Martin Anderson

We regret that in David Matthews's Letter to the Editor (Tempo 218, p.71) the order of his two music examples was inadvertently reversed.

• Operas by Ruders and Pape Guy Rickards

• Franz Schreker Orchestral Works Lloyd Moore

• J.M. Hauer's Zwlftonspiele Guy Rickards

• Late Cage Mark R. Taylor

• Concertos by Lees and Shawn Bret Johnson

• Vagn Holmboe round-up Guy Rickards

• Erik Chisholm and Animal Heaven Calum MacDonald

• Composers; Books received