A good deal has been said recently, in these and other pages, about the wealth of good music now being written under conditions of at least relative artistic enlightenment in the countries of the Eastern European bloc. Nobody, I imagine, will suggest that we should pay any less attention than we do to that welcome phenomenon. But at the same time it would be a pity if we were to forget that Western Europe still harbours a number of composers who fled from the East during the years when music was still not free to take its own course there, and when there was no immediate reason to suppose that the situation would soon improve. Of these, only the Hungarian Ligeti, who lives in Vienna, has been taken up internationally. The Pole Andrzej Panufhik, a comparable figure who happens however to live in London, is at present hardly recognized as a composer of even national importance.