In the first composition class I ever took, the professor began by asking us why we wanted to compose. This was a question I had been wrestling with for some time; I had just switched programs at my university and had needed to justify, to myself at least, why I should have taken the biggest risk of my academic career thus far. The question, put so baldly by this professor, had never actually been asked by anyone else when I announced that I wanted to change my course; secretly, I was glad of this, for I felt the answer was too personal and private and new to me to survive any kind of display, or attack.

Apropos of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and its libretto, Gordon Crosse, in Tempo 85, submits that “an opera is a fusion of word, music and action in which, perhaps, only the music can bear separate scrutiny. W. H. Auden once described librettos as ‘private letters to the composers', and so they are”. On reflection and inspection, Gordon Crosse is much righter than Auden; as a matter of fact, he could hardly be righter. I'll take up the ‘hardly’ a little further down; for the moment, I want to rejoice that somebody has, at long last, said it. Crosse's may sound a slightly commonplace statement once it's out, but that is true of many propositions which hit the truth right at the centre.

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.

As a setting for the enactment of important or dramatic events, theatre may be located anywhere. The construction of special auditoria to accommodate aspects of theatre as an art form of re-presentation and re-enactment in no way invalidates the concept of a theatrical drama which unfolds in the imagination or in the arena of everyday life. Music, like theatre, may be inspired by real-life situations, but whereas in modern Western civilization it has taken on a life of its own, and is played in the rarefied isolation of concert halls, theatre, being a more concrete form of representational art, has retained much closer links with the outside world.

After a period in which he had concerned himself with ‘free’ dissonance, Weill began, in 1926–27, to return to a harmonic language based on tonality. Many other composers were doing something of the kind at that time, and, like him, were associating a return to tonality with references to popular dance rhythms, whether traditional or modern. But whereas such figures as Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Milhaud tended to reject traditional harmonic usages, Weill proceeded to develop a largely triadic harmony, paring down his vocabulary to the most basic of chords and progressions. Although the power and originality of that harmony have been widely acknowledged, the technical issues have received little or no attention, at least in any published form. What follows is a preliminary and necessarily selective survey.

These lines of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the great poet of Portuguese modernism, may seem at first sight to invoke the principal element of fado, Portugal's national music: the element represented by that famously untranslatable word suadade, implying longing, nostalgia, homesickness … However, they hide far deeper resonances. Mensagen (Message), the poetic sequence from which they come, is a profound exploration of Portugal's history, a modern counterpart to Camoens's great 16th-century epic The Lusiads. It is connected to the nationalist Integralismo Lusitano movement, and to Sebastianism. Other poets, particularly Mario Sa-Carneiro (1890–1916), and plastic artists, notably Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso (1887–1918) and Jose de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970), similarly reflect the strength of these patriotic and mystical ideas in Portugal during the country's deepening social crisis in the early part of the century. But Pessoa, who famously split himself into several persons, each with their own name, style and poetic output, may also stand as a symbol of the different currents Portuguese composers have ridden in search of their national identity.

The career of any great artist can be divided into broad creative periods denned by discernible traits. Olivier Messiaen is no exception, despte the fact that, when discussing his music, it is now part of the common currency to remark upon the constancy with which he stuck to his idiosyncratic musical language. It is true that some of the techniques and spirit which he used in the first of his works to be published, the Préludes, can still be heard in his final masterpiece Éclairs sur I'au-delà…. Indeed, Messiaen himself encouraged this perception, so that the received wisdom is of the composer as a steady accumulator of techniques for a continually expanding style. On one level, therefore, this is a reasonably accurate interpretation in retrospect of Messiaen's career. However, within this broad quality of consistency, it is possible to detect places where the composer markedly changes direction.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a turning point in the history of modern music.

The excesses of the romanticists began to be unbearable for many. There were composers who felt: “this road does not lead us anywhere; there is no other solution but a complete break with the nineteenth century.”

Invaluable help was given to this change (or let us rather call it rejuvenation) by a kind of peasant music unknown up till then.

Some unusual biographical and æsthetic interest may attach to a few manuscripts existing in the archives of the Paris office of Prokofieff's publishers. More than most composers, Prokofieff had the habit of revising and re-arranging his early compositions, and as in the new versions much of the original texture generally survived, he obviously attributed their original failure to corrigible technical shortcomings while continuing to believe in the maturity of his conception. Of the works here in question, the two short symphonic poems Rêves (Op. 6) and Esquisse Automnale (Op. 8), Le Cygne Blanc and Les Vagues (Op. 7) for female chorus and orchestra and the operas Magdalena (Op. 13) and The Flaming Angel (Op. 37), all but the last were written between 1909 and 1912, that is to say, before he left Russia for the first time. It is unlikely that in the circumstances of his hurried and unplanned departure he would have taken these scores with him and we may rather assume that he found them again, like the manuscript of The Gambler, when he first returned therein 1927. He then brought them back to Paris to re-write them there. This is all the more probable as the Sinfonietta, originally Op. 5 composed in 1909, the manuscript of which may have belonged to the same batch, actually appeared in Paris in a revised version in 1929 as Op. 48. Esquisse Automnale was re-arranged shortly before Prokofieff's definite return to Russia in 1934 and as there is much evidence of his intention to continue to visit the western world, the fact that these manuscripts remained in Paris does not mean that he wished to abandon them.

Well, I've been collaborating with my wiie, the video artist Beryl Korot. Her work involves multi-channel video where the timings between the channels are very highly worked out – four channels where the first and third and the second and fourth would be interlocked – very musicaltype structures. So it was a natural collaboration, but the question was, what's it all about? In a few minutes we decided it would be the Cave of Machpela. Beryl and I had both become interested in our own Judaic backgrounds and had both begun studying the Torah. We discovered that there's a town in a very politically sensitive area of the world, Hebron, thirty miles south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, where Abraham is accepted to be buried by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Whether he's there or not is really immaterial. I think part of the decision to choose the Cave of Machpela was that, on a political level and as a human being living in the world today, I don't think you can understand what's going on in the Middle East unless you understand the Biblical and the Koranic level of the conflict – otherwise you miss the base on which it all stands.

The personality of Kodály over a period of forty years was a decisive factor in the development of new Hungarian music. In 1925, when works by a group of his pupils were first performed, his composition teaching was harshly attacked in the press. Kodály replied with a famous article, ‘Thirteen Young Composers’, in which he wrote: “we have to bring up not only European but at the same time Hungarian musicians … Only by the fusion of European and Hungarian traditions can we arrive at anything that will mean something to Hungary too”. Several of those thirteen played and still play a prominent part in Hungarian musical life, if not primarily as composers.

A distinguished musician, having glanced through the programme of the twentieth Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in London this July, asked “Why in a festival of modern music is there so little modern music?”—thus alluding to the large proportion of works by long-established composers.

Britten's Serenade, op.31, for tenor, horn, and strings, was first performed at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 15 October 1943, with Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and an ad hoc orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr. It was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West.

In a review of the first performance of James Clapperton's The Parliament of four Futtit Beistis, Jonathan Cross described the work's ‘blatant but effective modality’ as being ‘evidently an aspect of Clapperton's self-realignment with his Scottish roots’, and concluded, ‘whatever its origins, the end result is more effective than anything of his I have previously heard’.

In the process of my research on the topic ‘The Soviet Avant-Garde from the 1970s to the present’, I learned that one of the heroes (actually, the heroine) of my studies, Sofia Gubaidulina, had been invited by San Jose State University School of Music for a festival of her music. The annual festivals in the SJSU, called ‘The Annual Guest Composers Series’, are each dedicated to the music of a specific contemporary composer. The guests of previous ‘Series’ were Morton Subotnik (1993) and Mario Davidowsky (1994); the festival in 1995 was devoted to Gubaidulina; George Crumb was selected for the following festival in 1996.

I First Met Friedrich Cerha and his wife Traude in December 1956. After a concert given by the International Society for Contemporary Music—at that time still considered a small group of conspirators—in a remote room at the Musikakademie, my mentor Hanns Jelinek took me to the Gmoa-Keller on the Heumarkt to introduce me to the leaders of Vienna's musical avant-garde.

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.