‘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 feeling of nature I think is what I like so much in Grieg's best things. You have it too & I think we all 3 have something in common.

Delius to Grainger, 10 June 1907.

Spring always means for me a longing for Norway.

Delius to Grainger, January 1914.

A ‘Norwegian Cuckoo’? Well perhaps not Norwegian literally, but certainly figuratively. Perhaps, as we shall see, nothing more than an accidental cadence. Delius thought so, even if Grieg didn't; and it was probably Grainger who inadvertently acted as the go-between.

It was 1970. I was a student in Warsaw. Once a week our composition class would gather at the Academy for an analysis course. We were an odd bunch, a Hungarian pianist, a black Cuban composer, a conductor, two spirited Polish girls, and myself. But we were also typical of the sort of international group that had assembled in the Polish conservatoires at that time—musicians brought together by a common fascination with the Polish School, which was still very much in full flight, and by a determination to unravel its technical and aesthetic mysteries.

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”.

When an old man looks back on his life, it is natural that memory should soften disagreeable incidents and recall only the pleasant. This is perhaps the reason why Richard Strauss, too, confessed that the happiest memories of his life were connected with the town of his birth. He spent more than a quarter of his life within the city limits of Munich, and whenever he retired to his Garmisch eyrie or left it for his travels throughout Germany, Europe and America, to conduct the works of his great predecessors or interpret his own, his way always led him through his home town.

We all know that the Symphony of Psalms was ‘composed for the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’, but we don't always notice that this wry equivocation is appropriate to a work whose theme is the relationship between Man and God. A comprehensive and suitably illustrated analysis of the work in those (or any other) terms would fill at least a booklet. Here we must confine ourselves to the exposition and a few representative developments of the Man/God ‘theme’.

Recently there has been a revival of interest in the music of Richard Strauss, and in Britain more attention has been paid to his lesser-known works. The symphonic poems such as Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, along with operas such as Salome, Etektra and Der Rosmkavalier, have never lapsed from the performance and recording repertoires. But the undeserved neglect of pieces such as the Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and operas that rarely reach the stage in this country, such as Die Frau ohne Schatten, has begun to be remedied. A new development which can be seen as both cause and effect of this revival is the appearance of books in English dealing with Strauss and his music. These include recent reissues of Norman del Mar's three-volume Richard Strauss: a Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (1962–72, reprinted with corrections 1978) and Michael Kennedy's Master Musicians volume reissued with additional material in 1988. The study by Willi Schuh, whom Strauss chose as his biographer, was issued in 1982 in an English translation by Mary Whittall entitled Richard Strauss: a Chronicle of the Early Years.

With the exception of a few small-scale pieces programmed by the more adventurous contemporary music ensembles, the music of Salvatore Sciarrino has not been performed frequently in this country; BBC Radio 3 has given occasional airtime to larger works, but we have yet to hear much of his most important music in any form. This article should act, I hope, as a pointer to readers who might wish to explore his output on disc, which currently is really the only way to do so in this country.

Occasionally, in the history of operatic art, great works, with no pronounced revolutionary tendencies, yet models of simplicity, of sincerity, of artistic integrity, have been subjected to the most savage criticism, as unintelligent as it was undiscerning. We remain astounded at the lack of insight, of common-sense on the part of cultured critics. Even la Traviata was held up for censure as “prurient, foul and hideous”; whereas, in the whole of Verdi's work, there is nothing more poignant and sublime than Violetta's appeal: “Dite alia giovane.” Carmen was stigmatized as “grossly vulgar and vile,” whilst Vincent d'Indy—amazed at the aberrations of men—sadly remarked that the “music seemed crazy to nearly everybody.”

As it stands at present Bliss's Colour Symphony is a revision made in 1932 of a work dating from 1922. The historical background of the work is the Three Choirs Festival, and especially Elgar, at whose suggestion Bliss produced a work for the Gloucester Meeting. This is Bliss's first symphony. In the chronological list of his works it comes after the Mêlée Fantasque for orchestra and the Incidental Music to The Tempest. It was followed by the string quartet of 1924, the manuscript of which was lost, and the next composition for full orchestra was the Hymn to Apollo, dated 1926. Between the time when the Colour Symphony was written and that when it was revised, Bliss had written a number of works not only musically important but significant because they showed a rather different manner of expression and way of thinking. Among these works was Morning Heroes, a large-scale choral and orchestral composition, in reality a choral symphony (1930). It was after Morning Heroes was finished that Bliss turned once more to the Colour Symphony. He took it in hand afresh and feeling that his grasp of orchestral manipulation had become stronger, he refashioned the whole work, leaving only the third movement in its original shape. In its actual state, therefore, the work is fundamentally different from the original.

In the Introduction to his study of the Parry Collection of Yugoslav folk songs Béla Bartók contrasts ‘lexicographical’ and ‘grammatical’ principles in the systematic grouping of folk melodies. Although the former makes it possible to locate a melody by comparatively simple means, Bartók states, the latter is to be favoured; it is of higher importance “to get a clear idea of the relationship of melodies than to be able to locate them easily”. He then enumerates the components of his own grammatical system which, in order of weight, include: section structure, metric (syllabic) structure, rhythmical character, final notes of sections (caesurae), range, and so forth (cf. Plate 1 column headings).