Any survey of music in the area that we are accustomed to call Latin America should begin with certain basic distinctions intended to dissipate the superficial notion of cultural homogeneity. Let us agree at the outset to regard the term “Latin America” as a loose geographical designation for those portions of the Western Hemisphere that lie outside of Canada and the United States. It is better to resort to such circumlocution than to risk the misleading assumption of a fundamental similarity in the twenty countries with which we are concerned.

The house is tucked away behind a corner of the road. Once you have passed the gate, the entrance lane, three sleepy dogs, the hall, a spacious living room and the doors to the terrace, you are face to face with the most magnificent Tuscan landscape imaginable. The view of the hills is unspoilt, as is the silence around. It's the ideal place for Luciano Berio to create the colourful, imaginative sound-world that has made him, at the age of 70, one of the most popular and admired composers of today.

LEIBOWITZ IS DEAD, but the hostility smoulders on, and one wonders what, beyond personal involvement, lay behind it. Boulez, too, has long been relegated to the unending line of historical cases—as can be seen from the ‘dated’ impression made by the second volume of Musikdenken heute. It seems difficult to revert to an earlier stage of musical theory, let alone one even earlier than that, without invoking purely ‘historical interest’. But the pre-history of the serial movement, which has left its traces on everyone's consciousness, could explain both its signal success and its ignominious failure. Its collapse has been total; the ostensible reasons for the abandonment of the movement were no less threadbare than for its inception. Leibowitz, the ‘classic dodecaphonist’, left some theoretical loopholes, but one can hardly make him the scapegoat for errors lying outside his responsibility. Even in retrospect, his mowing down by ‘progress’ cannot be justified; but it is not merely an act of reparation if one still, or once more, gives him serious consideration.

The development of Bridge's language after the Cello Sonata of 1913–17 is so sudden as to suggest some kind of inner upheaval. Perhaps it was associated with his revulsion against the war—Benjamin Britten has spoken of his teacher's passionately-held pacifist convictions—and there may too have been a feeling that his own cultural background had disappeared in the holocaust, along with so many lives and hopes. On the other hand, his developing language at the time of the Cello Sonata and the Second Quartet may have unlocked some door to his subconscious. Whatever the case, he appears to have experienced a crisis of style and perhaps of personality immediately after the War. It is significant, for instance, that with one exception no major work seems to have been conceived after the completion of the Cello Sonata until the crucially important Piano Sonata, begun in 1922 but not finished until 1925. The period between these two sonatas was almost exclusively devoted to collections of small piano pieces and a handful of songs, some of which indicate the beginnings of Bridge's new style. The single exception is the little opera in three scenes, The Christmas Rose, which was sketched in 1919 and scored ten years later. Moments of dramatic pressure elicited a rich harmonic response from Bridge in splashes of whole- and bi-tonal colouring; but over the work as a whole there lies an idyllic serenity in which the composer seems for the moment to be by-passing the problems which were soon to force themselves upon him.

Since Benjamin Britten Died in 1976, attention has turned to performance of those of his works which were little-known in his lifetime. To my mind, this activity has been an unprecedented success, quite different from the barrel-scraping seen in the cases of certain other composers. Not only has there been added, in Paul Bunyan, a worthwhile stage work that will be widely performed, but the remarkably self-assured pieces of his teens which have now been heard, and in some cases recorded, have added music of real value to our experience. However of even greater interest, in my opinion, is the considerable quantity of incidental music that Britten wrote for films, plays, and radio productions: these are now the last source of substantial, unfamiliar scores by him.

Before Schoenberg's Harmonielehre was published in December 1911 by Universal Edition, Vienna, extracts from it were printed in various periodicals, among them the final chapter, ‘Aesthetic Evaluation of Chords with six or more Tones’ in the second June issue of Merker. Besides examples from works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Bartók and Berg, the chapter quotes a passage from ‘a string quartet by my pupil, Anton von Webern’: bar 5 of the first movement of op. 5, composed in 1909 and first performed in February 1910. There are some pointers as to how this quotation came about.

It was surprising to discover that Professor E. J. Dent's English version of The Magic Flute has been in use in this country for thirty-five years or more. His version, made originally for Lilian Baylis's opera at the Old Vic in its semiamateur days, is familiar to all regular opera-goers here, for it has been in constant use since the opening of Sadler's Wells in 1930, and at the Royal Opera House since the establishment of National Opera there. Now, W. H. Auden, the librettist of The Rake's Progress and one of the foremost modern poets, has wandered into the thankless field of opera translation and the English version which comes from his hand and that of his collaborator, Chester Kallman, has already been used in a television performance of The Magic Flute in America on the occasion of the bi-centenary anniversary of Mozart's birth. It was much praised.

• Maxwell Davies on Collins Classics Mike Seabrook

• Henze on EMI John Warnaby

• Holliger's ‘Scardanelli Cycle’ Michael Gorodecki

• Roberto Gerhard Piano Music Julian White

• Recent Górecki discs Jim Harley

• Recent Russian discs Susan Bradshaw

• Godowsky's Chopin Studies Alistair Hinton

• Poul Ruders John Wamaby

• Ernst Krenek Guy Rickards

• Alan Bush Mike Seabrook

First of all I must tell you which part of the country we wanted to explore. We went to Southern Anatolia, near the Syrian border, where the Yürüks have their winter camps. The Yürüks are a nomadic tribe who camp in the hilly parts of the South during winter and live high up in the Taurus mountain in summer. We assumed that a tribe that has still kept this ancestral form of life would very likely have preserved many of their old musical customs. That is why we cast our eyes on their land when setting out on our first journey.

Philip Grange has been an outstandingly successful young composer by any standard. He has a large number of works to his credit, commissions which look like occupying him for some time, and his works are receiving regular performances. Critically he has been described as a ‘distinctive … bright new talent, with a strong music concept beautifully worked out’ (Times, June 1980) and ‘a new and individual compositional voice’ (Daily Telegraph, January 1981). These were both descriptions of the work with which he first attracted attention in London. Cimmerian Nocturne was composed in 1979, commissioned by The Fires of London, and received a performance on the 7 August as part of the Proms season.

At fifty, Oliver Knussen has an output of formidably accomplished works behind him, composed at consistently high levels of invention and imagination, instantly recognizable both for their harmonic language and their clear, resonant instrumentation. Yet, surprisingly in view of Knussen's long-established international reputation, the musicological and analytic fraternity has been slow to pick up on what Knussen has been up to since the mid-1970s. There is almost nothing in print which goes into any technical detail as to the painstaking methods by which these spontaneous-sounding pieces are built up. Knussen himself has written little about his own work – preferring, as with his conducting activities, to place the advocacy of the work of others on higher priority than his own.

In 1974 Henri Pousseur created a large-scale homage/critique of Schoenberg, The Trials of Peter the Hebrew. That other mandarin Stravinsky has received two testimonials, a collaborative piece called Stravinsky au futur, and L'effacement du Prince Igor—The Obliteration of Prince Igor. All of Pousseur's resonant titles contain so many associations—here the Russian lineage, the Stalinist embargo, the social position (not King of the Stars?), the aristocratic conceit, the alleged erosion of personality.

A good deal has been said recently, in these and other pages, about the wealth of good music now being written under conditions of at least relative artistic enlightenment in the countries of the Eastern European bloc. Nobody, I imagine, will suggest that we should pay any less attention than we do to that welcome phenomenon. But at the same time it would be a pity if we were to forget that Western Europe still harbours a number of composers who fled from the East during the years when music was still not free to take its own course there, and when there was no immediate reason to suppose that the situation would soon improve. Of these, only the Hungarian Ligeti, who lives in Vienna, has been taken up internationally. The Pole Andrzej Panufhik, a comparable figure who happens however to live in London, is at present hardly recognized as a composer of even national importance.

If Schnittke's plundering of past styles brings to mind Stravinsky, important distinctions must be made. Schnittke does not quarry the past with Stravinskian detachment; his stylistic amalgams can be a deal more riotous (as for example in the First Symphony) than anything Stravinsky would have countenanced. It is in fact Shostakovich rather than Stravinsky who comes to mind as the more apparent influence, with his striking juxtapositions of the sublime and the banal, the diatonic and the chromatic. Schnittke's music can occasionally sound like listening to Shostakovich through an accumulated wealth of musical debris from the Western tradition. Another obstacle to any assessment of Schnittke's work lies in the apparent naivety of so much of his technique. Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs (or whole movements, as in the opening movement of the Requiem of 1974–5), and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formulations. The Quasi una Sonata (1968) for violin and piano, for example, demonstrates that ten years before the Concerto Grosso No. 1 Schnittke was exploring the use of chromatic tetrachords in quasi-serial formulations.

Philosophy, said a great thinker, is the product of wonder. With even more assurance that may be said of art. The basic weakness of all art criticism is that it can analyse everything but the “wonder” of a work. Art is certainly never the product of explanation. Picasso has complained that everybody wants to “understand” painting. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do they not try to understand the songs of birds? Why are they content to love the night, a flower, everything around them, without seeking to understand such things ? Whilst painting they must understand’. Those who try to explain a work of art, he added, are nearly always on the wrong track. He might have dropped the “nearly”. If one wants to know the time it is scarcely necessary to take the clock to bits.

The Black Gondola, John Adams's transcription for chamber orchestra of Liszt's La Lugubre Gondola II, composed in 1989 for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota, shows how – as in the case of Wiegenlied (discussed in an earlier article, Tempo 175) – the composer has been attracted to those aspects of Liszt's late style which inter–connect with minimalism: regular, and fluid, rhythmic textures; economy of thematic material which undergoes ‘minimal’ transformation; extensive phrase repetition in a ‘sequencing’ structure; harmonic ambiguity and elusiveness. In addition, in this case, a strong programmatic element is evident in the symbolism of the original piece which is heightened considerably within Adams's transcription: an expression of the dramatic style which has influenced his recent stage works, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.

Well, this is what happened. My impresario had introduced me to Miss Alice Tully from New York and Miss Tully wanted to commission a work from me for the American Bicentennial. I had no time and I said that I would be unable to accept her offer, but then she invited me to dinner. In the course of the meal, she told me how much she loved animals and that she travelled to India for the sole purpose of shaking the paw of a lion. Well, at first I laughed at this story, but then afterwards I recalled the account of the ‘Chevalier au Lion’ of Chrétien de Troyes, a French romance of the Middle Ages, and after having laughed, I cried. I said to myself, that woman is amazing, to go all the way to India just to see a lion and shake its paw, that's marvelous, and I accepted the commission.

SCHOECK: Penthesilea, op. 39. Yvonne Naef (mezzosop), Renate Behle (sop), Susanne Reinhard (sop), Ute Trekel-Burkhardt (con), James Johnson (bar), Stuart Kale (ten), Cheyne Davidson (bar), Imke Büchel (speaker). Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno, Basle Symphony Orchestra c. Mario Venzago. Musiques Suisses MGB CD 6232 (2-CD set).

‘Contours’: New and Recent Music for Clarinet by DONATONI, SMITH, UDUMAN, CAUSTON, ROMANO, SCIARRINO, ERBER and FOX. Kate Romano (cl). Metier MSV CD 2074.