The recent NMC recording of chamber music by Robert Saxton has broadened our knowledge of his oeuvre, complementing the perspective on his music that had been opened up by recordings of his orchestral works and the opera Caritas in the early 1990s. Certainly, the period 1990 to his fortieth birthday in 1993 represented a highpoint in terms of public recognition, but in recent years much of Saxton's composition has been in the more private sphere of chamber or solo music, or in the less prominent medium of choral writing, and it has received less sustained attention than its quality deserves. But while most composers are subject to fluctuations of interest, the not unalloyed distinction of being called a sucéss d'estime is a very real hazard of today's musical climate, especially for a composer who writes the sort of serious music that Saxton does; and from being frequently programmed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, his work currently seems to present less of a fashionable surface while continuing to be highly regarded by many serious commentators. But Saxton has made creative use of the 1990s as a time for thinking through the implications of his earlier music and reconsidering aspects of his style and approach to structure. This article looks at some of the music of almost the decade from Caritas (1991) to his current major project, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, an opera being conceived specifically for the medium of Radio. In the music of this period, Saxton has continued to demonstrate the ability to harness his wide intellectual interests to an essentially consistent compositional style and a single-minded artistic vision.

Fifty years ago this December E J Moeran, Jack to his friends, died as he fell off a pier into the Kenmare River on the west coast of Ireland in a storm; he was only 55. Seventy years ago this December Philip Heseltine, Peter Warlock to his public, died in a gas-filled basement room in Chelsea; he was younger still, only 36. Suspicion of suicide has attached to them both, and while Moeran probably met his end through natural causes (a cerebral haemorrhage), Heseltine probably did not. Barry Smith's Warlock biography adduces evidence that makes death at the composer's own hand seem still more likely than was hitherto thought, even if another recent book, the memoir of Heseltine's son Nigel, counters this with a temptingly shocking though fairly untenable theory of murder by fellow-composer Bernard van Dieren.

The icicle clearly delineated by the opening gesture of the upper strings in George Benjamin's A Mind of Winter is an original notational conceit, achieved by staggering the entries of the first and second violins so that a kind of stalactite is readily discernible on the page. It is the spacing of this cluster of minor seconds inside a defined timbral field and the precision with which the composer accords these, the smallest intervals within chromatic space, a rigorous series of durations, their hard edges rendered diffuse by almost inconsequential glissandi, that allows what might become academicism in the hands of a lesser craftsman to take on such a vibrant sonority. That this symbol of the coldest season is preceded by a percussionist's practically imperceptible roll with soft sticks on a suspended cymbal shows a composer deliberately relying on onomatopoeic devices to conjure up a soundscape percolated by such wintry gusts, themselves ushered in by a brief but telling period of silence that ‘fills’ the first, empty bar.

Colin Matthews is one of Britain's most best respected contemporary composers. He studied classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall, and at the same time with Nicholas Maw. In the 1970s he taught at Sussex University and completed a doctorate on the works of Mahler. During this time he also worked with Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. Currently he is the administrator of the Holst Foundation, a trustee of the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the founder of the influential record label NMC. The interview was conducted by e-mail over a few days in November 1999, and is particularly interesting in the light of the mild controversy caused by the successful first performance of Pluto: see Raymond Head's review in Tempo 213.)

Herbert Howells's debt to Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis is both well known and well documented. I have shown elsewhere how the features of the phrygian mode lead to the use of I–bII and V–bVI (sometimes expressed as parallel fifths) in both Vaughan Williams and Howells. There are three particular tributes from Howells to Vaughan Williams that especially bear the stamp of this influence. Two are the paired set Ralph's Pavane and Ralph's Galliard from Howells' Clavichord (published in 1961 but written earlier), a work in which individual pieces are inscribed – as Elgar would say – to ‘my friends pictured within’; the third is Sarahande for the 12th day of any October from the Partita for organ (published in 1971). These three pieces derive some of their features from a Vaughan Williams work written much later than the Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis – the ‘Pavane of the Sons of the Morning’ and the ‘Saraband of the Sons of God’ from job (1930): and some features come from John Dowland's Lachrimae (‘Flow my tears, fall from your springs…’, first published in 1600, but written earlier). Howells's use of Renaissance models – Pavane and Galliard pair, elements of Dowland's Lachrimae, and modal features – vividly illustrates Vaughan Williams's remark that he sometimes felt Howells to be the reincarnation of one of the lesser Tudor luminaries.

Judith Bingham is currently one of the most sought-after composers in Britain. Following the breakthrough occasioned by the première in 1993 of her first orchestral work, Chartres (1988), she received commissions from organizations such as the BBC Philharmonic, the Proms, Hereford Three Choirs Festival, the Northern Sinfonia and Westminster Abbey. Although one of her most successful works is undoubtedly her elegiac Piano Trio entitled Chapman's Pool (1997), which has already received over seventy performances, she has produced a series of impressive large-scale compositions which build on the qualities that made Chartres such a triumph. They all possess a heightened sense of atmosphere – usually centred on a specific place – a fine ear for orchestral colour and an ability to create an immediate impact, either through massive pounding tuttis or by means of wraith-like chamber textures. It is especially frustrating that none of Judith Bingham's works for large forces are available on disc: a serious omission I hope will soon be rectified.

A musical work can tell a story as beautifully as a work of literature can. In music we may not easily grasp the meaning of the story but there is nevertheless a fascination about its semantic potential. The type of narrative such a work expounds can be described as allegorical, because of the ambiguity of its semantic definition. We are free to interpret it in whatever ways we like, but one of the interests in a narrative is the way in which it encodes specific strategies of interpretation for the listener. As long as there is a story there are always characters involved who act as the reader, the narrator, and the author behind the work, regardless of whether they really exist as actual people. This discussion focuses around the role of the reader-listener: its aim is to show that the reader-listener's contribution is a fundamental element in understanding not only the process of narration but also the work's aesthetic scheme itself.

Book Reviews

• The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music Caroline Rac

• Walton: Music and Literature Paul Chipchase

• Cuchulan Among the Guns Colin Scott-Sutherland

• Hoist Among Friends Raymond Head

• Settling the Score Mark Doran

• Janacek Studies Anthony Gritten

• Helsinki: Sallinen's ‘King Lear’ Ronald Weitzman

• London: Proms 2000 reports Tom Service

• Robert Stein

• Martin Anderson

• Bill Hopkins piano music Patrick Ozzard-Low

• The Goodwin/Walton ‘Battle of Britain’ Mark Doran

• Englund's Cello Concerto and Symphony No.6 Roger Sutherland

• Hartmann Guy Rickards

• Cage Mark Taylor

• A British Music Round-Up (I) Martin Anderson

• Garbage Concerto, Rock Symphony Paul Rapoport

• Pettersson Sonatas Peter Palmer

• James Tenney Mark Taylor

• Röntgen Piano Concertos Paul Rapoport

• Czeslaw Marek Peter Palmer

• Eötvös John Warnaby