‘One if by Land, Two if by Sea’… so ran the pre-arranged signals for Paul Revere's famous midnight ride. But what if three beacons had shone from the belfry? Confusing to history's nocturnal horseman, perhaps, but not to Peter Maxwell Davies, for whom landscape, seascape, and Renaissance church architecture have furnished the poetics of the first three works in what Paul Griffiths has called ‘the most important symphonic cycle since that of Shostakovitch’.

I Well Remember hearing my first Rorem work—his Symphony No. 3 of 1959, with its wealth of melody and uninhibited joie de vivre. I determined to hear more and soon realized that there has been too little comment on him (not to mention performances!) on this side of the Atlantic. His reputation, earned in the 1950's and 1960's, as ‘America's foremost composer of art songs’ has been consolidated whilst he has been venturing into many other areas of musical terrain. Indeed, he has been a busy man—with more than 30 major works to his credit since 1970: and since his reputation as a composer of large-scale orchestral and choral works is less clearly perceived in this country, I propose to concentrate on this aspect in a brief survey of how his art has developed in recent years.

The Strauss Operas of the Gregor collaboration, Friedenstag (1935/6), Daphne (1935/7), and Die Liebe der Danaë (1936/40), have sadly failed to establish themselves in the international repertoire. They are, indeed, often dismissed out of hand as products of an inspirational lapse on the composer's part; as works which, standing outside the main stream of his development, represent a musical ‘backwater’ into which he was driven by the exigencies of his times. Careful study of these operas, however, marks them not only as consummate examples of Strauss's musical craftsmanship, but also as documents of considerable significance in relation to the rest of his creative oeuvre.

The Recently Issued Recording of Simpson's Eighth String Quartet has given us an opportunity to examine a change in that composer's approach to large-scale form. He himself mentioned this ‘new way’—without using such a Beethovenian expression—in a BBC Radio 3 discussion with Michael Oliver, on 6 November 1982:

In earlier times I was interested in large-scale tonality, large areas of tonality: but now I'm trying to find what intervals themselves can generate, using the resonances inherent in simple intervals like the fifth, the fourth or the third. I try to generate something from that by feeling it in a novel way, by approaching the interval of a fifth as if I had never heard it before, and trying to find what can happen—or by using intervals against each other. Take two intervals, the second and the fifth; then you have a combination of intervals and you can use them in different ways against each other.