At centenaries we usually invite those who have special knowledge of a given figure to attempt a statement of a career, and argue for revaluation. At the very least the ordinary music-lover is usually given the opportunity to hear a range of unfamiliar music and make a personal decision. (Furthermore, with the modern phenomenon of home tape-recording, unofficial tapes get into circulation which ensure that judgements, whether right or wrong, are never again merely the handing-down of prejudiced statements from one writer to the next.) However, the centenary which falls on 5 January is particularly worthy of note, for it is that of a composer potentially of great interest—the subject of innumerable footnotes in reference books—but almost totally unheard, owing to a long history of suppression of his art in his native Russia. I refer to Nikolai Andreievitch Roslavets, one of the most advanced composers of his time: an early investigator of serial techniques, whose musical revolutionary passion was strongly linked to his support for the proletarian revolution, and who ultimately had to sublimate his musical tenets in order to accord with political developments with which it would appear he was not musically at ease.