‘In the winter [of 1910–11 Stravinsky] went with Maurice Ravel to Varese, an Italian town not far from Como, found in a stationer's shop an exercise book and, tempted by its presentation and the quality of the paper, he and Ravel bought one copy each.’ For the next two years Stravinsky carried this book from ‘The Lindens’, a pension in Clarens, to Monte Carlo, Paris, Venice, to his summer home in Ustilug in Russian Volhynia and finally back to the Hotel du Châtelard in Clarens, and in it he wrote the first draft of The Rite of Spring.

The appearance of Shostakovich's Second Symphony on a gramophone record some time ago, and its public performance at a BBC symphony concert in London last October, marked its emergence from a period of over forty years of almost total neglect. Bearing the subtitle ‘To October: A symphonic Dedication’, it was composed in 1927 (two years after the highly successful First Symphony, which had established the composer's international reputation) in response to a commission from the State for a work to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. But while the score bears as its heading words from the Communist Manifesto, ‘Workers (Proletarians) of the World, Unite’, and the composer's avowed intention is ‘proletarian’, the musical idiom is often far removed from this. The symphony was given its first performance in Leningrad on the 6 November 1927, and as Dmitri Rabinovich, Shostakovich's Russian biographer, says in his book, “got a fairly good press but after a few performances disappeared from the repertoire”.

• Smalley's Gloria Tibi Trinitas 1 (Stephen Walsh)

• Del Tredici's ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ (Hugo Cole)

• Williamson's Second Symphony (Anthony Payne)

• Petrovics's Crime and Punishment (Imre Fábián)

• Gerhard's Leo (John Buller)

• Two works by Bedford (Brian Dennis)

• Works by Musgrave, Hamilton and Wood (Norman Kay)

(1) Past, (2) present, (3) future. (4) Development, (5) progress, (6) historical validity. (7) Out-of-dateness, (8) what one must, can, and can't do today. I hope my list gives an accurate picture of the contemporary whirlwind of critical and historical concepts, including those implied criteria on the basis of which composers praise and damn each other and each other's exponents and denigrators. Stop the whirlwind while we clear the concepts, one by one.