Getting to grips with Harrison Birtwistle's ever expanding oeuvre is becoming an increasingly challenging business. The forthcoming South Bank Centre festival naturally provides occasion for some critical stocktaking. Yet the retrospective schemas within which composers' works are traditionally placed seem less than usually appropriate. The idea of linear development is of as limited use to understanding Birtwistle's creative progress as it is to explaining his musical forms. Contrasting musical surfaces, for instance, testify to the difficulty of useful generalization about the recent works' lineage. Whereas the crisp, pulse-based clarity of many pages in The Cry of Anubis bears comparison with moments in Earth Dances and the contemporaneous Words Overheard, Panic's impenetrable textures and sonorities are more reminiscent of the earlier Verses for Ensembles and An Imaginary Landscape. The treatment of musical form in the recent works similarly resists summary description.

The British Library recently acquired the sketch material for a good number of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, ranging from some of the earliest pieces up to, at the time of writing, music of the early 1990s. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the available material and to demonstrate some of the valuable insights it affords into the composer's working methods.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's fascination for madness is clearly reflected in at least three of his works: Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), Miss Donnithonie's Maggot (1974) and Caroline Mathilde (1991). What are the consequences of this fascination for his music? How can madness in Davies's oeuvre be understood? In this article I will argue that, in spite of all his modernistic aspirations, Sir Peter's work shows a postmodernist tendency expressed iii the regular occurrence of the theme of madness, and the way it is disseminated through his music.

A Michael Finnissy work is like a journey from one point to another, along which there are any number of digressions off the ‘main path’, some of them extended. By the end of this journey, one realizes that the digressions were far more interesting than the conclusion: indeed the journey primarily served the purpose of enticingone into the space in question. As a ‘guide’ through the near 200 works that occupy Michael Finnissy's catalogue in the year of his 50th birthday, I shall take the liberty of constructing ‘paths’ of my own: after all, there are an infinite number of such paths, and though none will lead us through the oeuvre in its entirety, I wish to give some impression of the sheer scope and stimulation of Finnissy6s body of work.

• The writings of George Perle Michael Graubart

• Paul Griffiths's ‘Modern Music and After’ Ian Pace

• Michael Chanan's ‘Repeated Takes’ Julian Silverman

• Nicholas Maw's Orchestral Variations Malcolm Miller

• Kancheli's ‘Life without Christmas’ Susan Bradshaw

• Ronald Stevenson's Cello Concerto Martin Anderson

• Apartment House Concert James Erber

• Donaueschingen and Stuttgart John Warnaby

• Sibelius's ‘The Wood Nymph’ Martin Anderson

• Maxwell Davies First Symphony etc. Mike Seabrook

• William Mathias's String Quartets John Pickard

• Shostakovich's ‘Limpid Stream’ Edward McKeown

• The Music of Sofia Gubaidulina Ronald Weitzman

• Henze and British Minimalism, or not Julian Silverman

• László Lajtha Bret Johnson

• Vasks and Sumera Bret Johnson

• Recent Xenakis discs James Harley

• British Piano Duets Robin Freeman