One of the most refreshing and absorbing features of the American musical scene is the high proportion of ‘eccentrics’ among composers—Billings, Ives, Cowell, Partch and Cage to name but the most prominent. This can be accounted for, in part, by the proverbial nature of the place as a ‘cultural melting-pot’, forging what often seem to be diametrically-opposed styles and aesthetics together into new idioms which occasionally prove to be something more than the sum of their components. Another factor is the very size of the country: the convenient divisions of East-coast, Mid-west, West-coast, South and so forth can refer not only to different areas of the land mass but also to highly contrasted cultural tendencies. This is not terribly clear from our vantage point, as the (still) disgracefully scanty information which filters across the Atlantic does not allow us to piece the bits together into a satisfactory picture—and thus even the informed listener may be at a loss to place a composer of David Del Tredici's originality into some sort of context.