Approaching His Eightieth Birthday, Elliott Carter has acquired a new fluency, as if composing had suddenly—finally—become easy. In his middle years Carter felt compelled to exhaust a musical vocabulary with each composition. Since the solo piano Night Fantasies of 1980, however, he has based a series of widely different works on similar premises: after years of ploughing through rocky soil it was now time for the harvest. As an overflow of this bounty Carter has produced a new (for him) genre: short occasional pieces of three to six minutes in duration. Along with the five major works composed since Night Fantasies, there are seven new short works for media ranging from solo violin to large orchestra. The inventiveness and high spirits of his recent music may call to mind those other wonders of a secondyouth, Falstaff and Agon.

When He Learnt of William Glock's appointment as the BBC Controller of Music, Walter Legge wrote to his former colleague (in earlier days both men had been critics), ‘I feel as though I were a citizen of sixteenth century Wittenburg and Martin Luther had been elected Pope’. The astonishment was wellnigh universal, for up to that point Glock had seemed an outsider on the British musical scene.

It Was, Dear William, distinctly chastening the other day to discover your signature inside a precious score which had been living and sleeping in the shadow of my piano for many years—so many, indeed, that I could have sworn it actually belonged to me. Since you arc one of those rare spirits for whom the lending of books and scores is inseparable from the delights of possessing them, you probably don't need my sorry example to remind you of how easily an au revoir can become an adieu. But now that the wanderer is safely back on your shelves, the frivolous thought that this is another sense in which I'll be wishing you many happy returns has been replaced by a more serious one; for as soon as I begin to ask myself how much else that I like to call my own—and I don't of course mean mere ‘belongings’—is in fact owed to you, there emerges an immeasurably greater question whose bearing on every one of us will surely be illuminated by the celebrations of your splendid birthday. The question is this: how much have we tended to take for granted, and how much have we forgotten or never investigated, about the nature and extent of your manifold contributions to musical life and understanding within and beyond this small island?