Sometime in the 1530s, Henry VIII's chaplain Thomas Starkey addressed a text to the king in which he argued that:

Starkey articulates several criticisms of the persistence in sixteenth-century English legal life of Law French – the Anglo-Norman French idiom taught to law students and in which much medieval case law was transcribed. First, he sounds a clarion call for the vernacularization of English law, arguing that the public good depends on legal texts being drafted in an idiom everyone can understand. Second, he couches his translational injunction in terms not only of utility, but of national honor, arguing that English law's reliance on a foreign tongue represents nothing short of an odious stain on the kingdom. Third, he justifies his gallophobic language-planning initiative with a historical narrative that characterizes the Norman Conquest as a ‘subjection’ to a foreign power and the subsequent introduction of French into England as a humiliating mark of submission. Fourth, he traces sharp distinctions between ‘we’ English and ‘our’ English language, on the one hand, and Normans and the ‘French tongue’, on the other.

Starkey's condemnation of the linguistic and legal legacies of the Norman Conquest is interesting in several respects. It demonstrates that the French of England still mattered in his own day, as linguistic reality, object of historical reflection and subject for polemic. By proposing a radical break with this state of affairs, it represents nothing short of an attempt to denaturalize a language that had served as an important medium for English political, cultural and social life for centuries. For Starkey, there was nothing truly English about the French of England, and the sooner the Tudor kingdom's laws and lawyers were rid of it, the better.

In his very first sentence, Allen Shawn confesses to suffering from phobias. In the next one, he mentions he has written some books. Those who wish to have an idea of the ordeals of someone whose life has been an uphill struggle to achieve a semblance of normality in his day-to-day existence, should read Shawn's achingly beautiful, disarmingly honest and upsetting memoir, Wish I Could Be There (London: Penguin Books, 2007). His music, as far as I know it, bears no trace of any lack of balance. It can be full of joie de vivre; the presence of jazz in a range of compositions lends them an unmistakable American flavor, but his lyrical slow movements refuse to be pigeonholed: they are universal in their humanity.

July 29, 2015

As someone who lacks physical courage, and who has anxieties about many ordinary situations (I suffer from phobias), I know that I often have to summon “courage” just to follow through with the most mundane tasks. At the same time, I have devoted my life to composing music, an activity that is not highly rewarded in our society, which I have supported by teaching, playing the piano, and writing a few books. You might say it takes courage to pursue an activity that is poorly rewarded, is not part of the cultural mainstream, and is utterly intangible. But I wouldn't say that. I make music not because I am courageous, but because doing it is what comes most naturally to me, makes me feel most alive, and helps me make sense of being alive. When I compose a decent piece, or even a decent phrase, I feel that I have justified being on this earth. It is my way of celebrating being alive, and also of participating in the huge world of music. Although the composing itself is solitary, being a part of the world of music and participating as a composer, performer, and teacher is a connection on the deepest level to the world and to other people, past and present. I am therefore very lucky that somehow I have managed to keep composing, and that the urge to do so was not thwarted by circumstance or by my feelings of discouragement and inadequacy.

We are increasingly inclined to see oral and written use of French in medieval England as a capability open to many, rather than something reserved to a privileged few. In considering the political poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we have moved well beyond Thomas Wright's suggestion that complaint in French was a brief post-Conquest deviation shared among courtiers, separate from the larger tradition of popular complaint by ‘the people with their good old English’. Rather than a succession of disparate political and legal languages, each the province of a particular social class, from English to Latin to French then back to ‘good old English’, we now see languages and their speakers as overlapping and intermingling. Some words inhabit all three languages; some are newly imported from one language to another to supplement a technical vocabulary; many have vernacular meanings in everyday life but also specialized senses within a particular realm of competency, whether law or commerce or shipbuilding. In some settings language choice may well have been constrained by convention or by the competencies of speaker or audience, but for the highly literate trilingual clerics who wrote and revised and recopied the poems we will examine here, complaining in French was a choice. French allowed them the greatest latitude to address political and legal ideas that had until then mainly been discussed in Latin, yet that were figured by a key term and concept at home in all three languages: consent.

To be sure, consent was (and is) an everyday word as well as a juridical term, and ordinary and legal discourses could find themselves in contact over precisely this term, as for example in the treatment of marriage cases in the ecclesiastical courts. The same is true of any number of other words, as William Rothwell has observed: medieval poetry in French is replete with a legalizing vocabulary whose resonances can be missed by the modern reader because it emerges as a specialized use of ordinary language. Some words pass fluidly between languages, not always separately anchored by language-specific spelling or morphology, especially in overtly mixed-language contexts: the Assize of Clarendon, for example, a legal document recorded in Latin, consists largely of French loan-words, as William Rothwell has pointed out.

Ever since I joined the staff of Universal Edition in 1992 and became a regular visitor to Donaueschingen and other new music festivals, works by Helmut Lachenmann featured on the programs as a matter of course. I experienced him as a revered figure whose authority lent unquestioned significance to his support of younger colleagues—gestures that he makes generously whenever his judgement inspires him to do so.

Performances of his compositions, whether he was present or not, were always greeted with applause—without the slightest hint that not everyone in the audience appreciated his instantly recognizable, highly individual musical language.

I took it for granted that it had required quite a bit of courage for him to develop an idiom that he himself characterizes in our e-mail exchange (below) as “a consistent application of noise” and “the alienation of instrumental sound.” The significance and background of the rest of the sentence (“to be played by musicians at their own ‘peril’”) escaped me at the time.

Lachenmann's firm rejection of the very idea of courage led to my tonguein- cheek (and, admittedly, cheeky) remark that he was apparently a composer whose path had been smooth, free of thorns and potholes.

That in turn provoked his protest: “Are you making fun of me?” which was followed—as you will see—by his impassioned admission that his path had been anything but smooth—indeed, doubt had accompanied him throughout his career and he had had to overcome it time and time again. Nor was his reception as unanimously positive as my own experience had misled me to believe. Indeed, from the very beginning, Lachenmann's music has had a hard time gaining acceptance, in the face of the animosity of musicians, critics, and the public. Scandal has been a recurring feature of his performances.

If only I had known, I would not have provoked him with my irresponsible remark.

We resumed our correspondence in July 2016. Helmut Lachenmann was impelled to expand on his statements of the previous year. I am truly overwhelmed by the beauty of his words:

As a European not really familiar with musical life in the United States, I have no means of establishing the extent to which the music of George Crumb forms part of the standard concert repertoire today. I do remember that his music—primarily the chamber pieces—were de rigueur at concerts of new music, certainly in Hungary. One could rattle off their titles without a moment's hesitation: Night of the Four Moons (1969), Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Black Angels (1970). They had a sound world all their own and were pleasant to listen to, reinforced by the comforting knowledge that in enjoying Crumb one was being ahead of the times. If I remember correctly, no Feldman, Brown, or Cage were programmed at the same concerts; Crumb comfortably stood for new American music.

In his reply to my first question in my 1983 interview, Crumb listed his sources of influence with remarkable clarity. He was quite obviously perfectly aware of whom he had learned from (Mahler and Debussy, as well as Bartók and Webern) and what exactly he had taken over from them. Oddly enough, what he failed to comment on was what inspired him to use direct quotations from composers of the past. As Paul Griffiths cites the composer in his Modern Music and After, Crumb had “an urge to fuse unrelated elements and juxtapose the seemingly incongruous.”

If you want to find out just what lies behind Crumb's initial attraction and his relative disappearance from concert programs (certainly in Europe), you need go no further than Richard Steinitz, also quoted by Paul Griffiths, combined with Griffiths's subsequent explanatory notes: “The direct quotations from Bach, Schubert, or Chopin, heard through Crumb's strange and unworldly soundscape, acquire an amazing aura of distance both cultural and temporal. Surrealist museum exhibits, their mummified beauty seems utterly remote, like a childhood memory of warm, homely security.”

Griffiths goes on to explain: “It worked. But it worked only as long as tonal and atonal were strictly separate categories, implying a similarly strict separation between ancient and modern.

Luca Lombardi was born in the year that World War II ended. This puts him at a considerable advantage over composers born in the 1920s—Nono, Berio, Boulez—who were cut off in their formative years from music that, in fascist regimes, was considered degenerate, primarily music of the Second Viennese School. Even the slightly older generation, such as Henri Dutilleux, had had a hard time catching up and digesting the experience of encountering for the first time in their lives an idiom that was radically different from what they had grown up with.

One is struck by the tone—and of course the corresponding content—of Luca Lombardi's recollections. Carefree might be an apt way of describing it. He himself uses the word “freedom” at one point, and that could be the key to his attitude to his art. He realized at a young age that writing music was his natural way of expressing himself. What tools he might hit upon and how those tools may be received by the outside world do not seem to worry him in the least. An admirable and enviable philosophy of art and life.

Luca Lombardi is one of those composers for whom personal style is not something to strive for. Like Heinz Holliger or Péter Eötvös, he is perfectly happy with the apparent fact that each new piece turns out to be different from the previous ones—that there is no instantly recognizable Lombardi profile in music.

He is like a mussel—the pearls he produces are musical compositions. Each is an object in its own right, and whether it was born in hard labor is something he does not reveal. The beauty of the pearl is what counts.

Tel Aviv-Yafo, September 1, 2015

A few years ago, a colleague asked for a “motto” about my work, to be included in a publication she edited. I sent her the following text:

Here is one composer who does not speak in terms of courage but rather staying power, not about tyranny of taste but about chicanery. Manfred Trojahn would thus seem to have been unaffected by what other composers with weaker nerves might have experienced as atrocities; indeed, he appears to question the raison d’être of this book.

Looking objectively at the examples he cites from his life, though, I do believe that those subjects have nevertheless had their relevance for Trojahn. He may have developed a protective shield with the help of his irony and arrogance, but it is hard to believe that the incidents he recalls have not lefta trace. He certainly remembers them vividly.

I think those incidents must be of interest for students of recent music history: how young composers could be hounded by apostles of so-called New Music, how those composers might have been made hopelessly insecure through diametrically opposed expectations by critics, were it not for their inner certainty—and how that inner certainty can nevertheless yield to nagging question marks that can produce a blockage in their minds. Even Manfred Trojahn admits that he stopped composing for a year, he was so unsure of himself.

If you look at his worklist, you cannot but be impressed by its dimensions and diversity. He is one of the most successful opera composers in Germany and has made his way in other genres as well, in a niche of musical life that exists side by side with and wholly independent of the avant-garde scene. Trojahn has also had a fair share of official recognition in the way of awards and positions: he was president of the German Composers’ Association for several years and was also deputy director of the Composers’ Section of the Academy of Arts.

March 2, 2016

On consideration, I have come to the realization that courage is probably not the best word to describe what an artist needs to do the right thing. I have never had to live under conditions where my activities would have created life- or even existence-threatening situations. Such conditions would have required courage for me to stay upright and I do not wish to know if I would have been able to muster it.

Olga Neuwirth is a courageous woman. She does not hesitate to voice her criticism of social injustice in her writings, interviews, and addresses; she also takes up the cause of minorities. Her outrage finds expression in her music as well as in her words.

Olga Neuwirth's writings reveal someone who has experienced and suffered a great deal. She is sharp-witted, tough, but also vulnerable. A fragile woman, who in our interview seemed to open up to my questions without any reservations, so that the interview made a strong emotional impact. I hope something of that impact will emerge in the transcript.

Vienna, March 14, 2016

I have read your beautiful text on Eleanor. It is a work that particularly appeals to me—and I have the impression that it is a kind of self-portrait. Let me quote you: “For me, this composition is a tribute to all those who have dared and still dare to voice criticism despite social and political opposition.”

And you go on to say: “Eleanor would … especially like to pay tribute to courageous women—which explains the woman's name in the title.”

It also seems that “courage,” “criticism,” “dare” are keywords for you, as are “wound” and “fight”: “The name Eleanor is a reference to Billie Holiday. Beginning in childhood, her life was marked by abuse, which leftdeep wounds. Wounds that made it difficult to live. Her great talent, and the enormity of her soul and spirit were thus constantly fighting a sense of emptiness. Nothing was able to dull her profound nihilism.”

How about starting this interview with some autobiographical information? I would like to know what it was that made you the Olga Neuwirth we know. You, who—when asked if there was anything you were frightened of—said: “Of life itself.”

I just want to say this: I do not trust people.

Precisely. This is closely linked to the keyword “wound.” You have had many disappointments. Is this what lies behind your opinion that “Man is a rat”?

I must have been twenty-one when I said that. I am now nearly fifty and my opinion has not changed. On the contrary.

Unlike so many Australian composers whose names may be familiar in Europe but whose music has failed to penetrate through the geographical distance (I am thinking of Peter Sculthorpe and Richard Meale in particular), Liza Lim has achieved a remarkable presence in Europe and the United States, while also remaining active in the musical life of her native country.

Lim's initial contact with Europe might have come about thanks to her studies in Amsterdam with Ton de Leeuw. In any case, invitations have followed for her to write works for major European ensembles and festivals, also to compose an opera for Berlin, where she was artist-in-residence of the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD in 2007–8. Liza Lim has also accepted major commissions from orchestras in the United States such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and has lectured at several universities. In 2008, she was appointed professor of composition at the University of Huddersfield.

Her contribution to this book mirrors her devotion to her art, her striving for authenticity, and, perhaps most important, her sensitivity to even minute stirrings in the outside world. Similarly to Robert Morris and Luca Lombardi, she values artistic freedom, which enables her to produce works no one else is capable of giving as a giftto lovers of music.

May 2, 2015

Dear Bálint,

Thanks for the invitation to contribute something to the conversation about “courage.” For me, the word in relation to artistic practice, could perhaps be substituted with “authenticity”—to be true to one's inner spirit without being swayed by pressures to conform to external voices as to what constitutes success in art. This pressure might be about being accessible and commercially productive or in equal measure about being “cool” and reflecting the latest intellectual and technological trends. These kinds of pressures are often about meeting expectations about some kind of image or branding. I’m amazed at how many ways there are of creating zones of inclusion and exclusion in the politics of art.

I’m not saying that an artist shouldn't be in dialogue with the world and all its trends—not at all since I feel that I am rather transparent to my environment and often very much influenced by some subtle thing occurring in my field of consciousness that registers on my antenna.

Creation springs at least in part from the will to communicate—in word, sound, color, and shape. The desire to give birth to a vision stands at the beginning of a process that will be influenced by tradition and contemporaries alike.

Creators are placed at the end and at the start of the history of their field of activity. They look back, they look around in the present, and cast a look ahead. How they will react to what they have perceived depends on the nature of their gifts. Are they going to be pioneers or will they take over the torch from their predecessors?

In any case, they will come upon ideas that may well surprise them: they emerge unannounced and produce unexpected situations in which the creator must make a decision. That decision will logically lead to others, opening up a road, pointing in a direction, with the goal possibly still vague.

What psychological barriers, if any, did James Joyce have to overcome to progress from Dubliners of 1914 via Ulysses of 1918–20 to Finnegans Wake of 1923–39? Did courage play any role? He was certainly aware of the risk he had taken in Ulysses: “That book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.”

The motif of risk-taking and courage also appears with Vincent van Gogh: “What would life be like without the courage to take risks?”

What psychological barriers, if any, did Kazimir Malevich have to overcome to progress within a span of eleven years from his colorful Spring Garden in Bloom of 1904 to conceiving and releasing his abstract Black Square in a White Field? Did courage play a role there? Despair is probably a more fitting definition of his state of mind, for he described the creation of the black square as a “desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity.”

When I interviewed the German composer Jörg Widmann, he spoke of the “courage of despair,” and also “fear of his own courage.” No doubt about it: the new is born in labor, with despair and courage and risk-taking being synonyms of pain.

One lesson I have drawn from compiling this book is the extent to which popular music and jazz have influenced classical composers, both in the United States and Europe. Libby Larsen freely admits to the role Chuck Berry, James Brown, and Big Mama Thornton have played in her development, in addition to Bach, Berlioz, and others.

If you listen to her music, as a European not really well-versed in the American tradition, you cannot fail to discern an underlying streak of what one identifies as coming from the United States, without being able to define just what it is. Of course, the presence of ragtime is obvious in pieces like Mephisto Rag—one does not need the title to help one place the music—but in Holy Roller for alto saxophone and piano, the uninitiated cannot trace the influence to what the composer describes as “classical revival preaching.” One hears a mixture of influences that, to this listener, include, jazz, Debussy, and even, at one point in the piano, Beethoven—but it is of course altogether subjective and probably wrong. More importantly: Holy Roller is a colorful, multifaceted piece of music, ideal for a good saxophone player, that cannot fail to appeal to an unprejudiced audience.

Interestingly enough, the vocal music that I have heard sounds more English than American to my ears, with The Peculiar Case of H. H. Holmes at the top of my own private list. It is a wonderful psychogram of a tortured soul that comes across with irresistible power even before one finds out that Holmes was a serial killer in Chicago who found ingenious ways to torture his victims. Any baritone with psychological insight, and a background not just in Lieder but also in opera, will welcome this unique challenge.

I have heard Libby Larsen's one piece for young performers, Hambone, which is great fun for the children to play (having to slap their thighs and shout, in addition to playing instruments) and also for the audience. It is the wind parts that help place the music as coming from the United States.

November 9, 2015

I have never equated courage with my creative process. For me it's the opposite. It would take a great deal of courage to silence myself and not compose.

The interview took place in the lobby of Jörg Widmann's hotel in Donaueschingen, on the eve of the premiere of Mark Andre's clarinet concerto über—a piece that Widmann had initiated. He was also responsible for its considerable technical difficulties: he had shown Andre many of the feats the clarinet was capable of.

Our conversation was inserted with some difficulty into his schedule as he was desperately trying to complete his work on a viola concerto: the deadline was the very next day. I was grateful that he should have squeezed in the time for it and I had concomitant pangs of remorse. It was a relief to hear a few days afterward that he had brought it off: the viola concerto was ready on time.

I have known Jörg Widmann for many years without our ever having conducted a proper conversation. There had been friendly greetings at Donaueschingen, Salzburg, and Vienna, but it was all too fleeting for me to form any reliable picture of his personality. The forty-five minutes we now spent together gave me some idea of the phenomenon Jörg Widmann.

This interview ought really to be heard and seen rather than read. The aural and visual aspects are very much part of it: the many nuances and registers of his voice, his innocent purity, his willingness to open up without any reservation, the musicality that imbues every word—all that captivated me. I sensed his vulnerability, a kind of defenselessness that deeply moved me; the interview itself proved ideal for the purposes of this book.

The next day I was impressed by Widmann's interpretation of Mark Andre's clarinet concerto. I was once again struck by his total identification with the music that also manifested itself in his body language. Respect for the music, humbleness, concentration—inspiring for the listener, to try to likewise identify with the work.

In recent years, I have encountered an encouraging phenomenon among younger composers, of whom Widmann is one, together with Enno Poppe, Rebecca Saunders, Mark Andre, and others: their mutual support and appreciation for one another's work, an attitude that was more or less absent in my initial years at Editio Musica Budapest in the early 1970s.

Enno Poppe's lanky figure with his abundant shock of flaming red hair is a familiar figure at new music concerts and festivals in Europe, mainly in Germany and Austria but also as far afield as Russia. You see him on stage as a conductor of ensembles (mainly of the one he cofounded in Berlin, the Ensemble Mosaik [1997] but also of other formations, such as Klangforum Wien), as well as in the audience. What matters is his presence.

If you read the interview with him, you are bound to be impressed by his strong feeling of responsibility for the cause of “New Music”—so significant in the working life of this highly talented, original composer.

If you look at his concert programs, you will be intrigued by the frequent absence of his own works. He formed his ensemble not so much to promote his own compositions but, again, to serve new music. And one is impressed by his enthusiasm for his fellow composers whom he regards as comrades-inarms— rarely does one encounter a composer who is so full of praise for his colleagues.

If you read on, you will also be struck by his immersion in the music of his forebears, such as Haydn—you may not hear it when you are actually listening to his music, but íts roots do reach deep down—evidence of his searching spirit, his inquisitive mind, and, again, of his sense of responsibility toward his calling.

In thinking of Enno Poppe, I was struck by an admittedly far-fetched image—that of the Schutzmantelmadonna.1 I have decided to mention it nevertheless for, close as I am to the past and present of contemporary music, I am reassured by the presence of the figure of someone like Enno Poppe, spreading his protective cloak over the cause to which he has devoted his life.

Vienna, April 28, 2015

Revised January 29, 2016

You must have courage—always. You must always progress a step farther, and should have the confidence to discard whatever has failed to develop its potential.

Schoenberg: he was one who was incredibly good at whatever he was doing—and whatever he was good at, ceased to interest him. He was determined to make continual progress.

The State of Israel is a tiny country with a population of some eight and a half million people. It has produced proportionally many outstanding instrumentalists and singers who have made international careers. On the other hand, for whatever combination of reasons, there seem to be few Israeli composers who have had international success. I used to maintain a shortlived correspondence with Dan Yuhas (b. 1947), whose surname has obvious Hungarian roots (juhász means shepherd). In Donaueschingen especially, I would come across the name and the music of Dror Feiler (b. 1951). Most important, perhaps, I met Josef Tal (1910–2008) on my only visit to the country of my ancestors; I met him in his home overlooking the old city of Jerusalem. A few years later, he had a world premiere played by the Berlin Philharmonic, which brought him to Germany.

But there is no doubt in my mind that the one Israeli composer whose name has a familiar ring to it is Chaya Czernowin. She is the first one who comes to mind when one thinks of Israeli composers; her presence in our musical life is a simple fact of life.

We met on her visit to Vienna in the lobby of her hotel and I was struck by the depths in her dark brown eyes—the eyes of someone who has experienced much in life, the eyes of a thinker and perhaps, I hardly dare write this, the eyes of someone who knows more unhappiness than she does happiness. (How far one is allowed to go in making public one's subjective impressions, I do not know. But I am trying to write in these introductions the truth—my truth).

I was very happy with our interview, for her replies never failed to surprise me. How right she is, for example, that it is extremely difficult to reach a state of genuine loneliness—that it is something to aspire to rather than dread—to dispel the specters of all one's former influences, whose opinions might prove stultifying once one has developed a world of one's own. I used to imagine that the loneliness of a creator sitting at a desk might equal the earsplitting silence of a vacuum. How wrong I was—I now know that, thanks to Chaya Czernowin.

Rasmussen is a musician of many parts: in addition to his work as a composer, he has also written books on Robert Schumann, Glenn Gould, and Sviatoslav Richter. He has acted as a sort of music ambassador for Denmark, lecturing internationally on Carl Nielsen and other subjects, and has also taught composition. (I have read his Richter biography and was impressed: it is a fastidiously researched book, drawing in part on Rasmussen's interviews with people who knew the pianist, unearthing previously inaccessible material. Also, it is eminently readable.)

Rasmussen is a restless, searching spirit who has completed Schubert's unfinished opera Sakuntala and has prepared a performing version of it; he has reconstructed what he believes to be Schubert's unfinished “Gastein” symphony as well as an orchestral version of the melodrama Der Taucher.

His sizable oeuvre covers most genres, including arrangements ranging from Nielsen to Stravinsky and Satie.

Rasmussen's experiences as a student of composition, which he describes in his contribution to this book, gave me the idea of adding the “tyranny of taste” to the initial subject, “the courage of composers.”

I.

April 2015

The concept of courage in the creation of art makes sense only in a society where certain artistic expressions may result in harm or injury, be it mental or physical, from the power apparatus. Used about the process of creating art in a modern, western society it is a category error. To claim that the elite modernist Stockhausen needed more courage to write his music than the popular Britten to write his—or the other way around—is senseless. Whereas it certainly demanded courage from Shostakovich to write his From Jewish Folk Poetry in the autumn of 1948, at a time when Jews were jailed and killed in Stalin's Soviet Union. The work was first performed publicly only two years after Stalin's death.

Cage claimed to have “no ear for music,” he tossed coins and considered any sound to be music. It was this seemingly effortless attitude combined with his status as a world-famous celebrity that made many of his colleagues vengeful.

This chapter seeks to develop some of the broader theoretical ramifications of the pioneering work undertaken by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on the languages and cultures of medieval Britain. Her scholarship has paid meticulous attention to multilingualism in Britain, in ways that have often challenged more traditional literary histories and narratives of linguistic change. As part of this rethinking of literary and socio-linguistic histories, Wogan-Browne has also encouraged scholars working on both the French and English traditions to reconsider some of the linguistic and literary terminology that often shapes their objects of study. The present discussion is much indebted to this work, which has already raised important questions concerning how terms such as ‘language’, ‘multilingualism’ and ‘translation’ might be thought about in post-Conquest contexts.

Discussions of translation today often draw attention to ethical questions concerning how far translation facilitates an engagement with various kinds of difference: does translation – particularly translation into modern English – accommodate the alterity at the heart of any translated work, or does it render it invisible? If the latter, how can translations avoid the assimilation or suppression of difference? To what extent is cultural homogenization an inevitable feature of the market in which translation operates? The work of Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti has been central in motivating discussion of the ethical and ideological stakes of translation, as well as in interrogating the ways in which translators may comply with or resist the ethnocentric tendencies of translation in the modern marketplace. My title deliberately echoes that of Venuti's influential monograph on translation ethics, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Venuti argues against an assimilationist model of translation, advocating translation techniques that cultivate gaps and incompatibilities between languages, rather than seeking to smooth them out. Good, ethical translation in his view is demystifying in the sense that it manifests in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text (or ‘foreignizes’ it); ethical translation is also what he terms ‘minoritizing’, meaning that it cultivates a heterogeneous discourse that opens standard dialects, languages and literary canons to features of minority languages that may be alien to them.

It is curiously schizophrenic to be writing about a critic who has published critiques of my own books in the past. I do not mind admitting that I was rather overwhelmed by his detailed scholarly dissection of my Conversations with Xenakis (published by Faber and Faber in 1996). It was obvious that my way of interviewing was found wanting. Another book of mine, Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers (University of Rochester Press, 2011), fared rather better.

In fact, the publisher noted with palpable relief that this time Arnold Whittall was more positive in his judgment than he was known to be.

And now here I am, writing what must needs be a sketchy portrait of the man. But the Arnold Whittall I have gotten to know through our correspondence over the past years is rather different from the severe critic one encounters in his writings. He may set extremely high standards in his own works (he has published a number of books), his reviews, and his teaching (he is professor emeritus of King's College, London, having previously lectured at Cambridge, Nottingham, and Cardiff), but he is also generous and warmhearted. I have the impression that as a true teacher, he follows the careers of his former students with eager interest, taking pride in their successes. He is also a keen observer of the contemporary music scene in Britain and derives personal pleasure from coming upon promising new composers and compositions. I imagine he is a kind of father figure to many of those active in British music today.

Arnold's generosity was apparent the very first time I approached him. In preparing my book of interviews and a memoir, From Boulanger to Stockhausen (University of Rochester Press, 2013), I asked him if he would be willing to write the preface. Much to my delight, he replied by return post in the affirmative, signing his letter with his first name. This informality is of course nothing unusual in the English-speaking world, but it is something that I, coming from Central Europe, still find to be an honor and an unusual sign of goodwill. Even more important, in agreeing to cooperate, Arnold gave up many hours of his time to read the book and then to actually formulate an introduction to it, with no expectation of financial gain.