In analyzing any composition, we retrace certain moments in the creative process. It is wholly unimportant whether the work arose through the conscious application of some compositional principle, or purely intuitively (in which case we presume that the author himself ‘didn't notice’ it). If we can observe an underlying principle, it has an objective reality, and we are therefore fully justified in investigating it and regarding it as part of the compositional process. The deeper we penetrate the musical fabric of a work, the more subtle and profound are the principles we uncover. By its nature, genuine analysis seems almost a reconstruction of the original process of composition. It is true that we are often unable to establish the order in which various principles arose in the composer's mind; but this, in the long run, is not really essential.

Sergei Rachmaninoff has never attained serious consideration in the numerous dictionaries and symposia covering music in the century since his birth on 20 March (o.s.) 1873. And yet his music has survived where that of some of his more experimental contemporaries has had to be revived. Scriabin, one of Rachmaninoff's fellow-pupils in Zverev's class at the Moscow Conservatory, is an obvious example of a composer whose music was considered audacious and modernistic during his lifetime but fell into comparative oblivion after his death. It still remains to be seen whether interest in Scriabin will long survive the second death which often follows centenary celebrations. But Rachmaninoff's centenary finds his reputation neither in eclipse nor even, as it was ten years ago, resting more or less stably on half-a-dozen popular works. For some time most of his music has been attracting attention; there is little reason to suppose that the trend will prove temporary or insignificant, and frankly I hope it will not.

Stravinsky knew little about violin technique. It happens in the best circles. Schumann, on the evidence of his highly substantial string quartets, knew as much about string playing as I know about the cimbalom. Brahms and Tchaikovsky wrote great violin concertos against the violin. And Mahler's auditioning of violinists was a joke: ‘He attached the greatest significance to the steadiest possible bowing in sustained notes’, Carl Flesch recounts,

and therefore considered the beginning of the third act of Siegfried [Flesch means the beginning of Act III, Scene 3] a touchstone for the bowing technique of an orchestral violinist … He first asked me to play a Mozart Adagio, and then set the Siegfried passage in front of me. As my bow glided over the strings with the phlegmatic calm of a world-weary philosopher, he seemed greatly pleased, wanted to nail me down to the post of leader at once, and accompanied me himself to the administration building …

• Shostakovich's 13th Symphony Hugh Ottaway

• Bartók Jim Samson

• Maxwell Davies Peter Swan

• Messiaen David Lumsdaine

• Messiaen and Tippett Hugh R. N. Macdonald

• Carter and Sessions Justin Connolly

• Schuller/Bloch Guy/Chapman

• Schmidt/Prokofiev Keller/Gardner

• ‘Beatrix Cenci’ Irving Lowens

• Simpson/Lumsdaine Ottaway/Cooke