In 1952, I made a bare list of Britten's scores for the theatre, cinema and radio (of which nearly 40 were written in the three years 1935–7!). The list was published in Benjamin Britten, a symposium edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (London: Rockliff, now out of print). Britten's 60th birthday seems an appropriate occasion for further investigations, and the theatre music particularly recommends itself. How often in our time has a composer of Britten's stature been so intensively involved with the spoken theatre? Not surprisingly, it proved fruitful soil for many musical ideas that he was to develop later in his operas and other works.

The development of Bridge's language after the Cello Sonata of 1913–17 is so sudden as to suggest some kind of inner upheaval. Perhaps it was associated with his revulsion against the war—Benjamin Britten has spoken of his teacher's passionately-held pacifist convictions—and there may too have been a feeling that his own cultural background had disappeared in the holocaust, along with so many lives and hopes. On the other hand, his developing language at the time of the Cello Sonata and the Second Quartet may have unlocked some door to his subconscious. Whatever the case, he appears to have experienced a crisis of style and perhaps of personality immediately after the War. It is significant, for instance, that with one exception no major work seems to have been conceived after the completion of the Cello Sonata until the crucially important Piano Sonata, begun in 1922 but not finished until 1925. The period between these two sonatas was almost exclusively devoted to collections of small piano pieces and a handful of songs, some of which indicate the beginnings of Bridge's new style. The single exception is the little opera in three scenes, The Christmas Rose, which was sketched in 1919 and scored ten years later. Moments of dramatic pressure elicited a rich harmonic response from Bridge in splashes of whole- and bi-tonal colouring; but over the work as a whole there lies an idyllic serenity in which the composer seems for the moment to be by-passing the problems which were soon to force themselves upon him.

Bruce Cole is a 26 year-old English composer who, though a fairly late starter, has a number of substantial pieces to his credit. He studied with Harrison Birtwistle at the Royal Academy of Music from 1968 to 1972, having previously been engaged in such varied activities as playing piano in a rock group and free-lancing as a motor mechanic.

With Birtwistle, Cole started from the beginning: he entered the Academy still undecided as to what he should do and actually took composition as a second study for his first term (with piano as first study). He had no previous training in composition, but Birtwistle's teaching methods—described by Cole as ‘building in a straight line’—served as an excellent catalyst.

• Musica Nova Leon Coates

• Havergal Brian Paul Rapoport