As I start to write this I pick up my copy of the Pelican European Music in the Twentieth Century, edited by Howard Hartog (1962, but the original Routledge edition was 1957). It falls open – for the spine is hopelessly cracked from more than 40 years of constant use, and the pages are coming adrift – at page 257, and a familiar voice arises, discoursing on the most famous piece by Ravel.

It has often been said that David Drew first made his critical reputation with a series of three articles on the music of Olivier Messiaen – essentially, the first informed criticism of the French composer that had appeared in English – published in The Score and I. M. A. magazine in 1955. David's friendship with William Glock, who owned and edited The Score, was long-lasting: from this time, when he was essentially Glock's assistant in its editing and production, to after Glock's death in 2000, when he acted as co-executor of his Will. ‘A Suggested Placing’ is the concluding portion of the final Messiaen article, published in The Score Number 14, the issue of December 1955. The invocations of Charles Ives – at that period hardly known to his own countrymen in the USA, let alone outside it – seem particularly prescient, and should remind us that David had already published a knowledgeable survey of ‘American Chamber Music’(in Chamber Music, ed. Alec Robinson, Pelican Books, 1955).

In 1953 or thereabouts a London concert was announced containing the British première of Pierrot Lunaire, an epoch-making work as appeared to be the case from every book on music history I had been able to lay my hands on. So I got the score from the Pendlebury Library in the Cambridge Music School and duly became fascinated and perplexed. I then had a visit from David Drew, an undergraduate one year ahead of me. He had also wanted to see the score and had asked Charles Cudworth, the Pendelbury Librarian, how he could get in touch with the person who had taken it out. This was how I got to know David.

This article appeared in the July 1963 issue of Musical Times, whose regular choral music supplement of that month was Christopher Shaw's anthem for chorus and organ A Lesson from Ecclesiastes. It was the first writing of substance to appear about this composer, and very nearly the last to date.

From the time I met David, at least 40 years ago, in Florence, he impressed me with his wide knowledge and liking of contemporary music. This and other matters were spoken of with fascination, rapid changes of thought and feeling. I shall miss him a great deal.

This essay appeared as the introduction to the very fully documented booklet notes of the 2-CD set, LARGO 5130, issued in 1995 – for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II – by Largo Records (Cologne) as Testimonies of War (Kriegszeugnisse) 1914–45. The central composer of this collection is Boris Blacher, who is represented by his Alla Marcia, Dance Scenes, Chiarina, Partita for strings and 6 percussion, Sonatina No. 2 for piano, and Drei Psalmen for baritone and piano. The other composers are Harrington Shortall (Fanfare for Those who Will Not Return), Kurt Weill (Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen and Choral-Fantasie), Berthold Goldschmidt (Zwei Psalmen for tenor and strings), Darius Milhaud (Chorale for piano) and Vaughan Williams (Valiant-for-Truth).

When I heard the shocking news of David's death, I thought of favourite pieces of writing, the pick of which would be his Preface to the paperback edition of the first two books of Stravinsky's Conversations with Robert Craft. Plucking this cherished volume from the shelves and glancing at David's text, I was struck by the following line: ‘The true craftsman must at some point be a fanatic (and the fanatic who is a bad craftsman is an impostor or a lunatic)’. David may have been writing about Stravinsky, the ‘great Poet’ of the fable which tops and tails his Preface, but he could no less aptly have been referring to himself. To describe David's fanaticism and craftsmanship as complementary, or reciprocal, is hardly adequate: their relationship was symbiotic. Each spurred on the other and the coupling was extraordinarily fertile.

This was David Drew's last published article. Completed in December 2008, it appeared in May 2009 as a contribution to “… dass alles auch hätte anders kommen können”. Beiträge zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts edited by Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt, Luitgard Schader and Heinz-Jürgen Winkler, published as Band XII of Frankfurter Studien, a publication of the Hindemith-Institut (Frankfurt am Main: Schott ED 20571, 2009).

David Drew had discussed with the present editor a projected followup article for Tempo, to deal specifically with Walter Leigh's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and the ideological and critical misunderstandings which he felt were beginning to envelop it as a result of its citation in Fred K. Prieberg's Musik im NS-Staat. This was presumably one of the ‘several research-projects’ ongoing to which he alludes in footnote 37. Sadly, little if any of that projected article was written down. But since the publication of ‘North Sea Crossings’ in an otherwise German-language source must inevitably have found it few English readers so far, it seemed a fitting tribute to its author to reprint it here, with profound thanks for co-operation to Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, to Sally Groves in particular, and the estate of David Drew.

This article offers an analysis of the Second Piano Sonata ‘being and non-being create each other’, op. 82 (1990–91) by Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008), the first work in which Radulescu applied the spectral techniques he had developed in his music since the late 1960s to that most apparently unpromising of instrumental media for this type of approach: the solo, equal-tempered piano. And it has a quite specific aim: to analyse Radulescu's sonata in a descriptive language as close as possible to that used by the composer himself.

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