A. T. Gretchaninoff's work as a composer embraces all branches of music. In opera, in symphony, in chamber music and in liturgical music, Gretchaninoff has created inspired and profound works which have enriched Russian musical literature. But perhaps the most deeply felt and original of his compositions are in the field of song. His subtle knowledge of the potentialities of the human voice, and the extraordinarily beautiful piano accompaniment, which never intrudes but always gives expressive illustration to the text, make his romances and songs unsurpassed in the vocal literature of Russia and, indeed, of the rest of the world. Many of his songs long ago became popular both in Russia and in other countries. Thus, at the beginning of this century there was no important singer in Russia whose repertory did not include Gretchaninoff's songs. More than that, they spread among the mass of the people and became a part of its heritage. In every home where there was an interest in music or song, one heard the famous Berceuse (Op. 1, No. 5), Quand la hache tombe (Op. 1, No. 2), Triste est la steppe (Op. 5, No. 1), and many Other songs written by Gretchaninoff in his youth. It may be said that Gretchaninoff's songs were as popular in Russia at that time as Schubert's or Schumann's are in Germany. Subsequently these songs spread to Western Europe and America as well. The songs of Gretchaninoff's early period gained wide popularity, being most easily understood by the wide public. But the most musically valuable and the most mature and inspired of his songs remained relatively less well-known. And yet it is precisely in these songs that the composer's individuality and musical inspiration attained their full stature.

It is evident by now that swift political changes have had an impact on music scholarship in Russia. A radical shift from rejection to appreciation of the music of Russian early 20th-century modernists was announced on the pages of Sovetskaia Muzyka in January, 1991, where the following admission appeared: ‘By silencing the activities of the musicians of the Russian avantgarde for a prolonged period of time, we have in essence artificially narrowed the complex panorama of our music history.’ In the case of Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets, the process of historical revision has included recent publication and re-publication by Muzyka of some of his piano and chamber music. At a time when paper shortage is critical in Russia, such an effort demonstrates a sincere commitment to acknowledging his work. Certainly, another welcome result of this new attitude has been access, though apparently still limited, to the Roslavets archives in Moscow. The valuable information contained therein provides biographical details which finally allow for a substantiated and more definitive statement on the life of this composer who figured so prominently among the Russian modernists.

The bass moves into the middle: this is our musical revolution. Several composers after Webern, myself included, have been fascinated by harmonic structures which radiate out from either side of a central axis in reflecting intervals. Unless a strong contrary line is taken in atonal music the bass will remain at the bottom of what sounds like dissonant music. But in symmetrical mirroring structures it is forced, focal attention is forced, into the axial middle, because all relationships converge there: the sounds point to it.

The position of Aaron Copland as the dominant figure in contemporary American music has now won fairly widespread recognition over here; but the recognition does not depend on any very extensive knowledge of his works. It is general rather than specific; and indeed on the few occasions when his more important works have been played over here, they have been accorded a somewhat unsympathetic reception. Unlike most English critics, I happen to find Copland's music congenial and appealing. It is for this reason that I feel I may be able to make a few points about the nature and significance of his achievement that seem to have been, in this country, overlooked. I shall confine my attention to the two recent sonatas—for piano and for violin and piano—because they are relatively accessible and quotable, and because they are completely representative and amongst the most concentrated and mature of his works.

Like his name he was both dapper and ungainly. His clothes came from Lanvin but were unpressed; his hands were scrubbed, but the fingernails were bitten to the bone. His physiognomy showed a cross between weasel and trumpet, and featured a large nose through which he wittily spoke. His sunswept apartment on the Luxembourg was elegantly toned in orange plush, but the floors squeaked annoyingly. His social predilections were for duchesses and policemen, though he was born and lived as a wealthy bourgeois. His villa in Noizay was austere and immaculate, but surrounded by densely careless arbors. There he wrote the greatest vocal music of our century, all of it technically impeccable—and truly vulgar. He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.

During the 20 years that followed the completion of his first vocal work, The sayings of Páter Boniemisza op.7 (1963–68), György Kurtág established himself as a composer with an exceptional aptitude for vocal writing. His compositions for voice outweigh those for instruments alone in both quantity and substance throughout this period, during which his second string quartet, Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes) op. 13 (1977), is a ravishingly beautiful anomaly.

Kurtág's microludes are remarkable in at least two respects: firstly, some of them are so brief as to make even Webern seem verbose in comparison, and, secondly, Kurtág has managed to create something relatively rare—a form born of the chromatic scale itself The microludes are sets of 12 tiny preludes, one for each semitone. Each set moves from C to B by analogy to Bach's ‘48’; however, unlike the Bach pieces, the microludes are not essays in a particular tonality, but rather explore certain relationships to a particular individual pitch.

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.

‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.

Faced with his latest composition—Cantata, finished in 1952—persistent opponents of Strawinsky will probably again speak in terms of the “funeral baked meats of former styles,” especially as this time the baked meats, both literary and musical, bear an early Elizabethan label—an Elizabethanism, of course, to which Strawinsky has given (as always) a subtle modern twist.

A vast epic of the Jewish people in four Acts (or Parts), Der Weg der Verheissung is Kurt Weill's only collaboration with the poet, playwright, and novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The text was written in Austria in the spring and summer of 1934, and the score was drafted during the second half of the same year – mostly in the village of Louveciennes outside Paris. The musical perspectives are exceptionally wide: on the one hand they afford a view of all Weill's major compositions from the Mahagonny opera (1927–29) to Tlie Seven Deadly Sins and the Second Symphony (1933); on the other, they look forward to his very last stage work for Broadway, the ‘Musical Tragedy’ Lost in the Stars (1949) which he and Maxwell Anderson based on Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel, Cry, the Beloved Country.

It seems one has to start with Isobel Gowdie. Whatever neophobic propogandists may say, there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented. What made it more remarkable was that this was a capacity Saturday night audience, largely attracted – or so one presumes – by Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and the prospect of hearing the brilliant young Korean violinist Dong Suk-Kang play the Sibelius Violin Concerto. What proportion of that audience was further lured by the picture in the Proms brochure of the good-looking young man, posing moodily in front of the Glasgow Celtic football ground, and the article underneath, with its promise of a heady mixture of catholic-socialist-Scottish indignation, is anybody's guess – but it can't have been the majority.

The Rosenkavalier has run like a lovely musical theme through my whole life in opera. Sophie was the first important rôle which was entrusted to me as a beginner. The conductor, Gustav Brecher, even considered letting me do the première in Hamburg. I think that was in 1911—the second year of my engagement there, but then he thought better of it and gave the part for the first performance to Elisabeth Schumann. She was dramatically much more talented than I, and in spite of her youth had already given evidence of her delightful gift for acting and her ripening artistry in several rôles; while I was still very much in the background and really nothing more than an ignorant and awkward beginner with a nice voice. Then too, Edith Walker, who sang and acted Octavian quite enchantingly, wanted Schumann as Sophie, for which I certainly couldn't blame her. But at the time I was bitterly disappointed and saw everything in a very false light. I felt persecuted and surrounded by intrigue—how I laughed later on over this ridiculous idea! Elisabeth's whole being is worlds apart from any intrigue; she has always been the best colleague one could imagine—a wonderful character through and through. And Edith Walker certainly had no ground for persecuting me with disfavour as the stupid little beginner imagined. She only wanted the performance to be as fine as possible, and so very wisely chose Elizabeth. But suddenly I found myself only the understudy, and sat through the stage rehearsals in the hall gnashing my teeth and comforting myself with the thought that I was the dramatic victim of a finely woven intrigue. Later, when Schumann was not available, I was allowed to sing Sophie and had a very nice success with it.

When I started my Symphony in 1973, I had no idea that that was what it would grow into. The Philharmonia Orchestra had commissioned an orchestral work for 1974, and I wrote a moderately long single movement, provisionally called Black Pentecost. The title was taken from the end of a George Mackay Brown poem (which I had set for soprano and guitar, a short time before) concerning the ruined and deserted crofts in an Orkney valley—

The poor and the good fires are all quenched.

Now, cold angel, keep the valley

From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.

As a young pianist, whenever I listened to a recording by Artur Rubinstein, the music always sounded wonderfully convincing. But then, when it came down to studying the score, it was somewhat disturbing to find that he often performed the music in ways that were contrary to the score. This experience provoked many thoughts and discussions regarding ‘authenticity’, artistic ‘greatness’, and the changing contexts of performance practice.

The rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.