What we print here is the pencil draft of a critical account by Britten of a concert performance of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and a ‘trail’ for a forthcoming performance of Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth. The MS is in the possession of Mr. Eric Walter White, who has been kind enough to place it at our disposal. I have silently corrected the punctuation and obvious errors but have otherwise left the text unaltered. With the help of Britten's personal diaries (from which I quote by permission of the composer's executors) I have been able to locate the year in which the performances took place—it was 1936—and also identify the commission which led to Britten appearing (unusually, for him) in the role of critic.

Most young American and English musicians have been encouraged, I think, to disregard Mahler. At least I myself was. Always coupled with Bruckner, he was supposed to be a purely local composer. For Germans, I was told, he had a certain sentimental attraction, though even on the Rhine and the Danube, the academicians preferred Brahms, the glamour-seekers Strauss, and the modernists Schönberg and Berg. He was long-winded and formless—the bright intellectuals cited him as an example of a romantic self-indulgent, who was so infatuated with his ideas that he could never stop.

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.

Walter Piston, the American composer and teacher, died aged 82 on 12 November 1976. As a young amateur he learned to play nearly all the instruments, but he did not begin academic study of music until he was 25 He graduated from Harvard University with highest honours in 1924, studied for two years in France with Nadia Boulanger, and returned to teach at Harvard for over three decades, retiring in 1960. Among his pupils were Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter. His three main text books (Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration) have been, widely used for many years.

I Read with great interest the symposium on Britain's Contemporary Music Network which appeared in the December issue of TEMPO. I had known about this programme but became more intimately acquainted with it when I met Annette Morreau during her visit to Chicago last November. However, at the time, I had not realized just how strong a link the Network has been forging between the composer and the performer in Britain. Now, after reading the list of works performed—and the ensembles who have played them—during the Network's five-year history, and noticing in the printed schedule for the remainder of this season how often a single programme is repeated—as many as eight to twelve times, in some cases—I am particularly struck by the contribution the Network is making to the life expectancy of individual musical works.