“I haven't heard a good new opera or a good new symphony for—eighteen months.” Thus Kit Lambert the pop impresario in Tony Palmer's television film All my Loving, making, one would think, no outrageous claim, that is if one allows that he has not heard of Harrison Birtwistle and Cornelius Cardew. But one must realise that Lambert's view is the basis of a total dismissal of modern ‘classical’ music; for him pop is new heir to the classical tradition. A like view is held by Mr. Palmer, who on the strength of a moderately successful film (success of course was inherent in its subject-matter) and of some pretentious writing in the Observer, has been endowed with a certain ‘authority’. For him, the Pink Floyd outdo Cardew and Stockhausen in ‘modernity’, and even the Who's ‘Magic Bus’ (an inferior reworking of their brilliant ‘Talking about my generation’) puts Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements in the shade. I shall not waste space on these comparisons, but mention them as an illustration of how the pop world can be blinded to what lies outside it. Lambert and Palmer are the victims of their own high-power distribution techniques whereby nothing gets through without a hard sell. The commercial basis of pop has two important consequences in this context. First, the common ground which exists between genuine musicians in the pop and ‘straight’ fields is being obscured to the detriment of every one by promotional smokescreens.

The Shepherds' Calendar, which was commissioned for the UNESCO Conference on Music in Education in Sydney in 1965, was performed there for the first time on May 20 of that year. As the circumstances of its commissioning suggest, the work is designed for a chorus and orchestra of young people, and the forces were chosen not only with a view to what might be expected to be available in a large school, or group of schools, but also as being suitable for illustrating and commenting upon the words of the text. There are two main groups of performers, disposed on opposing sides of the stage: Group 1, consisting of the chorus, attended by 3 clarinets and bassoon and 3 percussion players, on one side; and Group 2, consisting of solo string quartet, flute, oboe, trumpet, trombone, with two further clarinets, 6 recorders and seven percussion players, on the other side. A further small group, consisting of treble soloist accompanied by glockenspiel and handbells, is placed as far as possible from the two main groups, preferably in an elevated position. The reason for this will appear when we come to discuss the text and the manner in which it is treated. But before leaving the subject of the instruments, it should perhaps be mentioned, as just one example of Maxwell Davies's by now well-known practical attitude towards music-making by children, that many of the percussion instruments can be home-made, and not a few of the percussion parts are capable of being played by children with little musical knowedge but with just three essential qualifications: a strong rhythmic feeling, a lively imagination and plain common-sense.

Unlike Beethoven and Bartók, Shostakovich turned to the string quartet comparatively late in his career. He had already reached his Fifth Symphony, in 1937, before the Quartet No. 1 appeared, almost as a diversion—an isolated work composed only on a modest scale. Any influences that it was to have on the later quartets (and these are by no means negligible) could hardly have been foreseen. It was not until after the great Seventh and Eighth Symphonies that Shostakovich really felt the continued creative need for the outlet of the string quartet. Since then this medium has taken a very firm place in his output, and this longlasting creative attention to such an intimate form of expression has brought its rewards both for the composer and for the listener. Indeed, Shostakovich's gradual mastery of form in general and unity in particular is one of the notable features of these works.

Sasha Tcherepnin, a tall boy for his age, was a familiar figure at the St. Petersburg Conservatory fifty-odd years ago, as he was seen walking down the corridors accompanied by his father Nicolas Tcherepnin, professor of composition and conducting, teacher of a generation of Russian composers, and himself a composer of stature. Paradoxically, it was Sasha's mother, not his father, who gave him his first music lessons. As soon as he learned to manipulate the piano keys, he began making up tunes of his own. There was so much music lying around the house that he picked up the rudiments of notation intuitively. He learned notes and the Russian alphabet at the same time. Now, at seventy, he cannot even remember when he could not read Russian words or musical notes.

• Amy, Barraqué, Boulez, Stockhausen (Tim Souster)

• Two new works by Gerhard (Stephen Walsh)

• Copland's Inscape (Robert Henderson)

• Connolly's Cinquepaces (Anthony Payne)

“And now,” I said to a prospective pupil, 21, with an awe-inspiring thesis on his heart, “I've got to go home and write 750 words on chance. The editor of Tempo wants them by tomorrow.” “Chance?” he asked respectlessly, “that's not your subject. Musical determinism, yes.” He was right; in fact, as will be seen in seven hundred words' time, he had given the reason why I chose the subject. As long ago as 1966, I was struck by the philosophical and indeed musico-analytical naivety of Iannis Xenakis's (otherwise fascinating) piece ‘The Origins of Stochastic Music’ (Tempo 78), which defends the introduction of mathematics into music on the basis of the proposition that “by reason of its complexity, the strict, deterministic causality extolled by the neo-serialists was a lost cause”. I wrote my heart out when total serialism started, diagnosing the lost cause as it was born—but I never observed any complexity: a phrase of Beethoven needed far more complex analysis than a page of neo-serialism, whose saint-like simplicity seemed its only charm. What produced the illusion of complexity was inaudibility: ‘This must be very complex: I can't hear it’. It wasn't complex at all; you just couldn't hear it. Xenakis got nearer the truth when he said, “A contradiction exists between the linear polyphonic system and the result as heard (my italics), which is merely surface and mass”.