In his excellent book Charles Ives and His America (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1976) Frank R. Rossiter presents the most thorough psychosociological study yet made of the life and times of this frequently misunderstood composer—dismissed as a hack by many, elevated to cult figure status by others, realistically appraised by comparatively few. Several chapters examine Ives's personal and musical relationships with other advanced composers working in America during his lifetime. Though he had virtually stopped composing by the 1920's and early 30's, Ives helped finance concerts for the Pan American Association of Composers—whose more active membership included Edgar Varèse, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, and Carl Ruggles—and the publication of much of their music in Cowell's New Music edition. Thus he became acquainted with these composers, in whose work is found ‘the American counterpart to the rich experimentalism of the Viennese school’. His relationship with them ranged from bitter antagonism (of Varèse) to close friendship (with Cowell and Ruggles). Before the recent ‘complete’ recording of his music, Ruggles remained comparatively unknown even in America, except to those fortunate enough to stumble across his name and music via Ives.

I Consider the phrase ‘New Simplicity’ not quite correct, insofar as one is led to assume that present-day music is evolving from an older, more complicated state to a newer, more simple one. Two things are wrong here:

1. present-day music is not evolving from the complex to the simple, but from the atonal to the tonal.

2. atonal does not mean complicated, and tonal does not mean simple.

In 1948, Pierre Boulez ended one of his articles thus: ‘I have a horror of dealing in words with what is so prettily called the aesthetic problem. Besides, I don't want to make this article any longer; I prefer to turn back to my MS paper.’

That attitude was to become characteristic of young avant-garde composers in the 1950's. A new world of sonic and temporal experience had been sighted from the standpoint of Webern's serial technique—a world centred on the organization of sound-material. Amid the bustle of striking camp and heading for the new Promised Land, the question of Beauty was not merely out of place; it was downright suspect. For it involved those criteria and taboos, value judgements and ideals, on whose ruins everyone was then standing. And yet—as Boulez's pronouncement show—a belief in the possibility of proceeding (yet again!) from neutral ‘sound-values’ involved a secret dialectic with the aesthetic considerations that had ostensibly been excluded from the discussion.

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.