How far can the adjective baroque be applied to organs? It is worth while beginning by asking this question because it is astonishing how often the word has been abused in this connection. Most etymologists believe that the word is derived from the Spanish for ‘a twisted pearl’. Authorities are not altogether agreed concerning the aesthetic values of its applications to architecture. It has been called ‘flamboyant gothic’, ‘grotesque’, ‘laterally distorted’, ‘the logical development of the vertical renaissance’, etc., according to the taste or prejudice of the critic. It eschews the wildest imaginative flights of the rococo. It is still substantial and controlled. It is easier to apply the word to architecture and painting, though there are parallel synaesthetic characteristics in music.

Twenty-Two years ago I had the privilege of talking to the Royal Musical Association about Byzantine music. At that time, Professor Tillyard and I had succeeded in transcribing some Byzantine hymns, after spending long years in trying to solve the riddle of their musical notation. I soon realised that Byzantine liturgical music was not inferior to plainsong and that it was well worth pursuing these studies more widely in order to compare the treasury of Byzantine hymns—hidden in a large number of manuscripts dating from the ninth to the fifteenth century—with the melodies of the Western Church.

Of the early life of Don Sigismondo d'India, Nobleman of Palermo and Knight of the Order of St. Mark, we know next to nothing: we know neither the date of his birth nor where and with whom he studied music. An eighteenth-century document tells us that he was born in 1562 and died in 1630, and one or two present-day scholars have accepted these dates. I think, however, that they ought to be regarded with suspicion, for they happen to be the dates of birth and death of Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, in whose service d'India spent twelve years of his life. Certain later events in d'India's life suggest that he was probably born about 1580. We do know for certain, however, that he was born at Palermo. Now, towards the end of the sixteenth century Palermo was already a fair-sized city: its population in 1593 has been estimated at 90,000. Yet neither there nor anywhere else in Sicily did the arts really flourish. Like most of the southern half of Italy, Sicily at this time was under Spanish domination: she was, as has been said, ‘a tiny ship towed by the great Spanish galleon’.

There has been a tendency to treat twelve-note music as an isolated phenomenon. This is appropriate in a close study of its structural features and musical purpose, but we shall be in a better position to ask the right questions about its origin and influence if we take into account other music which shows parallel developments. Such a preliminary enquiry may affect our view of its nature and historical significance, and my subject is this first step: less the evolution of twelve-note music than its place in the general evolution of music at about the time of its emergence.

The history of English music composed for the viols in consort begins in about 1530 and ends in about 1680—one hundred and fifty years of chamber music, comprising a repertory that is as rich as it is varied, and one that is almost overwhelming in its sheer bulk. Above all it is players' music, music to be heard from the inside; yet even Roger North, a judicious and public-spirited antiquary, writes in 1728 of consort music in terms of its effect on the audience or of its appearance in score. He complains that:

Historians of English music have always found it rather tiresome that so much of their source material for the first half of the fifteenth century survives only in foreign manuscripts, and chiefly in the libraries of North Italy. Very little of this music was available, at any rate in practical editions, until two years ago, when Musica Britannica devoted a volume to the works of John Dunstable; and it is only recently that modern techniques of photography have made these sources abroad accessible to the scholar or editor who lacks the time or the resources to travel. As a result, this very important music has been neglected by historians and performers alike. In the most recent general history of English music, for example, the achievements of Dunstable and his contemporaries are given a mere sixteen pages out of four hundred, though at no time before or since has English music been so famous and so influential abroad. Circumstances are to blame; but it is now high time that this music should be given its due, and there are encouraging signs that such a revival will shortly come about.

In a survey of this kind, which must of necessity be condensed, it seems essential to limit the period under review, as otherwise the field becomes too large and the subject-matter unwieldy. I am going to try to avoid this by deliberately restricting this paper to a review of what seem to me to be the most significant and the most interesting trends in post-war music in France, and I therefore propose to deal only with a small number of composers whose contribution seems to be outstanding for one reason or another. Those with whom I am more particularly concerned are, of course, the younger or post-war generation. But before coming to them I cannot avoid saying a few words about one or two of their elders who were already established before the war but who are still important contemporary figures. Among these are some who made their début during or immediately after World War One, but who today have reached maturity and are still in the front rank of French musicians. Prominent among these are, of course, such well-known figures as, for example, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric and Poulenc who are still fully creative, but whose work, even in its latest aspects, is too familiar to you for me to dwell on here.