Vaughan Williams' inspired attacks on musical history in The Making of Music (London, 1955) have come in for some heavy censure. “There is no physical reason,” he writes, “why an 18th-century composer should not have written the whole of Strawinsky and Schoenberg, provided that he had the pen and paper.” “Only the same reason,” Martin Cooper comments, “that prevents a monkey with a typewriter producing Hamlet.”

This article arose from the author's review of Daniel Albright's recent study Untwisting the Serpent – Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press). The review, now published in the Spring 2001 Issue of the Kurt Weill Newsletter (vol 19, no. 1), concentrates on Schoenberg and Weill, while the article explores other aspects of Modernism considered by Albright. Tempo's own formal review of Untwisting the Serpent is contributed by Peter Quinn on p. 00 – Ed.).

Herbert Howells said that the one experience which stood out as a vitally determining factor in his life was his first encounter with Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. ‘It was after then that I felt I really knew myself, both as a man and artist. It all seemed so incredibly new at the time, but I soon came to realize how very, very old it actually was, how I'd been living the music since long before I could ever begin to remember’. This paradoxical combination of the new and the old in Vaughan Williams is worth investigation, and its effect on Howells's own music awaits full exploration. The present article can do little more than introduce the topic, but it will have served its purpose if it points the way to further investigation.

Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.

Vienna's credentials as a cradle of modernism are too familiar to need rehearsing. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka conjure up a world at once iridescent and lowering, voluptuously self-indulgent and coolly analytical. Arnold Schoenberg has been accorded pride of place as Vienna's quintessential musical modernist who confronted the crisis of language and meaning by emancipating dissonance and, a decade later, installing a new serial order. It is a tidy narrative and one largely established in the years after the Second World War by a generation of students and disciples intent upon reasserting disrupted continuities. That such continuities never existed is beside the point; it was a useful and, for its time, productive revision of history because it was fuelled by the excitement of discovery.

This article presents a view of the first meetings between the oboe virtuoso Christopher Redgate and the composers Dorothy Ker and Fabrice Fitch. The article details some aspects of these meetings to highlight the processes that are at play in the earliest stages of collaboration. These processes are both practical (in which information about how the oboe works is uncovered and shared) and philosophical (in which the oboe itself becomes a significant source of new possibilities). The article traces a period during which Redgate was developing a new oboe, working with composers to create new repertoire for the new instrument. Arguing for closer attention to the ‘everyday’ aspects of composers and performers working together, the article explores some of the ways in which Redgate pulls apart his experience of performing to develop new technique and to opening up new possibilities for future composition. I also argue that the oboe, as much as the composer and performer, plays a part in shaping musical outcomes.

HARVEY: Passion and Resurrection. BBC Singers, Sinfonia 21 c. Martin Neary. Sargasso SCD28052.

Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet, ‘before the universe was born’, is a shining example of his radical compositional approach. With an intense interest in creating a rich, numinous sound-world constructed firmly on principles of nature, science and ancient philosophy, Radulescu developed a unique compositional language that breaks with traditional musical conventions. In hopes of illuminating the inner workings behind his often enigmatic compositional process, this article examines various aspects relating to Radulescu's Fifth Quartet: the work's formal construction, with a focus on its notation and overall large-scale harmonic development; the Quartet's rhythmic devices and their link to the philosophical underpinnings that drive the work; the extended instrumental string techniques employed throughout, the sounds they achieve, and how they are executed; and the work's spectral pitch organisation.

When Heinrich Ströbel commissioned Olivier Messiaen to write a new piece for the Donaueschingen Festival, he took care to specify that the piano and the ondes martenot were to be strictly forbidden. (‘Attention, Messiaen! Cette-fois-ci, pas d'onde, pas de piano!’) Such a specification is liable to be read as a measure taken to guard against any possible revival of the sound-world of Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8). In an effort to surpass the achievements of Turangalîla, however, Messiaen had moved rapidly and decisively in the intervening years. Brief periods of teaching at Darmstadt and Tanglewood led to an obvious surge of experimental works, followed by Réveil d'oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) and Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–8), his first attempts at composing primarily with bird songs. With the completion of Chronochromie (1959–60), the aesthetic stance of most of the ensuing works was firmly in place.

The project of introducing an unknown repertory into discourses on music can be approached in a range of ways. The writer can make a case about its regrettable neglect and its unjustified exclusion from a historical canon, or can argue for its (political) relevance to the present. Or s/he can simply try to persuade readers of its aesthetic qualities: this third desire might well drive the first two, however covertly. The path I take here is unabashedly more ambitious. In attempting to open the hearts and minds of the uninitiated reader to a composer little-known outside Switzerland and Hungary, I will suggest that he offers us a significantly new way of thinking about music history in the 20th century as a whole.

• Recent Messiaen books Robert Fallon, Christopher Dingle

• Essays by Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood Stephen Walsh

• Rzewski's ‘Nonsequiturs’ Clemens Gresser

• John Coltrane and Jazz Songs Rodney Lister

• Maurice Duruflé Bret Johnson

Cornelius Cardew's 193–page Treatise is the longest and most elaborate piece of Graphic Music ever made. Although it was intended for improvisation and realization, using as many or as few pages as required, and with no fixed rules of interpretation, the piece can be regarded as a graphic construction inspired by music – and with ‘music’, in the broadest sense, as its subject matter. It was influenced by the philosophy of Frege and Wittgenstein, and in particular the latter's exhaustive treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which not only inspired the title but almost certainly the composer's economical approach to this endeavour and the rigorous development of his material. It was composed from 1963 to 67.

At the Venice Festival this year the first performance was given of Stravinsky's Monumentum pro Gesualdo Venosa ad CD Annum. This consists of three of Gesualdo's five-part madrigals, ‘re-composed for instruments’ by Stravinsky. The madrigals he has chosen are ‘Asciugate i begli occhi’ (Book V, No. 15), ‘Ma tu, cagion di quella’ (Book V, No. 18), and ‘Belta poi che t'assenti’ (Book VI, No. 2). Stravinsky's full orchestra for the work consists of two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and strings without double basses, but he uses no trumpets or trombones in the first madrigal, and no horns or strings in the second.

Approaching His Eightieth Birthday, Elliott Carter has acquired a new fluency, as if composing had suddenly—finally—become easy. In his middle years Carter felt compelled to exhaust a musical vocabulary with each composition. Since the solo piano Night Fantasies of 1980, however, he has based a series of widely different works on similar premises: after years of ploughing through rocky soil it was now time for the harvest. As an overflow of this bounty Carter has produced a new (for him) genre: short occasional pieces of three to six minutes in duration. Along with the five major works composed since Night Fantasies, there are seven new short works for media ranging from solo violin to large orchestra. The inventiveness and high spirits of his recent music may call to mind those other wonders of a secondyouth, Falstaff and Agon.

The techniques and aesthetic of Xenakis's music have been widely discussed in books and articles—many by the composer himself. These issues belong to the ‘outside time’ characteristics of music which Xenakis has defined in his article ‘Towards a Metamusic’ (TEMPO 93). So far, however, there has been little or no detailed discussion of the ‘inside time’ aspect of his music, namely the problems relating to its performance, although it is generally known that many of his works—especially those where solo players are involved, such as Nomos Alpha, Mikka, Eonta, Herma, Evryali, Synaphai-Connexites—are exceptionally difficult to play. These problems are important and must be solved not only for the sake of satisfactory performances of Xenakis's music, but also because they raise wider questions concerning the further exploration of instrumental technique.

We would do the interview in the circle. It was clearing-up time after yet another rehearsal in the Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, and I was following a slow-moving John Cage of 78 years up the stairs as he embarassingly held doors for me and explained the tight schedule he was bound by. He has now visited the U.K. three times in one year, taking in the Huddersfield, Almeida, and Glasgow's Musica Nova festivals, all in the middle of his usual jet-setting around the world which occupies the greater part of his year. With such tight schedules and a time-consuming specialised diet, it is incredible that he grants interviews at all. His usual answer – based, as ever, in his infamous non-intention – is: ‘because people ask me to!’ Non-intentionality has been his basic aesthetic position since at least the 1950s, and as I found out, he's still finding fresh nuances there. At least when he's got the time to sit down at his desk. Why does he do it?

Sándor Veress, who was born in 1907 at Kolozsvár, a major town of Transylvania (now Cluj, Rumania), studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with Kodály for composition, Bartók for piano, and Lajtha for folksong research. From the age of twenty he was a prolific composer, of marked individuality—already strongly evident in the works of his first period, written in a very distinctive neo-classical contrapuntal idiom with strong national inflexions. By 1939 he had produced an impressive body of works, including two powerful and concentrated string quartets, a series of witty chamber-music sonatinas (1931–33) and the more expansive Violin Sonata No.2 (1939), a Partita for small orchestra (1936), the lyrical and poetic two-movement Violin Concerto (1937–39), a ‘Transylvanian Cantata’ for mixed chorus (1935), anda ballet The Magic Flute(1937).