Contemporary æsthetic theory is inevitably becoming involved in half-truths. There is a constant bifurcation of concepts, with one aspect often emerging as a unique value while the other is eliminated. Thus, many insist that music achieves its loftiest aims by suppressing form and concentrating on feeling. Within the category of feeling it is further insisted that only the loftiest feelings are admissible into the loftiest music. Or there are those who deny feeling; and those, like Satie and Weill who, legitimately fed up with the nineteenth-century ‘sérieux a tout prix,’ have gone to the other extreme of music with only the most ignoble content.

In an age when music has become increasingly mechanistic and more concerned with sound than content; when the language of music has become a veritable tower of Babel addressing itself to minorities of minorities; when dense ingenuity, often accompanied by pages of notes explaining what it is doing, is hardly even penetrable by the eye let alone the ear, and memorability is often more minimal than the minimalists, Hans Gál is bound to be a lone voice. He is, after all, 95 years old and learnt his craft from distinguished masters of the 19th century, imbibing the classical tradition in a world which could still lay some claim to civilization: that is before the First World War set in train increasingly rapid developments in technology and a steady decline in standards. If the artist's task is to reflect the world around him, then he has done this admirably. If he aims to expose society's weaknesses, it would seem that the forces of evil are winning. If he aims to console and heal—creating images of reconciliation in a barren world, as Tippett so tellingly puts it—then Hans Gál has certainly played his part in this reconciliation and it is our loss that his music is so little known in this country. Surprising, too, for he has been with us for nearly 45 years, composing, conducting, teaching, lecturing, and playing, but having no gimmicks to offer, no ad-man to promote him; and thus, being an essentially private man, never seeking to impose himself—‘the most unpushy composer I have ever met’ as one German radio producer puts it—comparatively few have had a chance to discover his worth.

Górecki lives in Katowice. He is a rare guest in Warsaw – usually he comes to the capital once a year, at the time of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. About his work, his plans and his achievements, he is reluctant to talk. By the same token, the promotion of performances of his works is not a matter with which he concerns himself, maintaining as he does that a score, and especially one that is published and therefore available to all who are interested in it, speaks for itself adequately enough to stimulate possible performers, or else leaves them cold.

Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex is not a book which has pleased everybody, but it was the starting-point of this opera. This is not the place to analyse the book's deficiencies, real or alleged, but to assert that it tells skilfully a tense and dramatic story based upon historical persons and happenings. The late Sir Desmond MacCarthy, in his recently published Memories, recalls an interesting opinion that Elizabeth and Essex is almost a sketch for a play and that Strachey's method was inspired by or borrowed from the Elizabethan stage. Both the composer and the librettist of Gloriana were able to see in the book a sketch for an opera, and both are ready to acknowledge their debt to Strachey's dramatic sense. This does not mean that Gloriana is wholly based upon Elizabeth and Essex, or that it has emerged merely as an operatic version of that book. In the first place the makers of an opera are not under the obligation of even a picturesque biographer like Strachey to stick closely to history or chronology. Secondly, the makers of this particular opera came to be less concerned than Strachey with the amatory motives of the two principal characters and more concerned with the Queen's pre-eminence as a Queen, a woman, and a personality.

• Wilfrid Mellers Between Worlds Geoffrey Alvarez

• Ernest Ansermet on Music Peter Palmer

In the ultimate assessment of Delius's art it is conceivable that his songs will occupy a somewhat minor place. In bulk, they do not loom very large in the catalogue of his works—a mere fifty or so in all, and of these perhaps a sixth were apparently not deemed by the composer worthy of publication. Yet it would be a pity to underrate them merely on the ground of their slender numbers or because Delius himself was apt in later life to deprecate, more especially, his early efforts. For it is sometimes the case that a composer will reveal himself and his idiosyncrasies in his first stumbling attempts and even more readily in the miniature than in the larger composition. Delius did not spring into the world fully armed but his basic idiom changed relatively little and no one can fail to find traces of the authentic Delius finger-print in his songs of all periods.

(The following conversation between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Juan María Solare took place in Kiirten – the small village near Cologne, Germany, where he has lived for many years – on 7 August 1998, during the ‘Stockhausen-Kurscn 1998’. The intention of these courses was, in his own (messianic) words: ‘Forward what I've tried to explain to your own students, wherever you work’. Through a whole week numerous pieces of Stockhausen had been performed in Kiirten, including several of his early works, composed almost half a century ago.)

The current standing of the Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935) rests almost exclusively on the works he has composed since 1976, the year the composer unveiled the first fruits of his newly-discovered modal formulae, or what has now become known as the ‘tintinnabuli’ style. There is, however, a large, important and up until now relatively unexplored series of experimental works that predate this seemingly radical change of style. For example, Pärt's first orchestral piece, Nekrolog (1960), was the very first piece of Estonian music to employ the 12-note technique, incurring the wrath of no less a person than Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful general secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union. Indeed at the Third All– Union Congress of Soviet Composers held in Moscow in March 1962 Khrennikov singled out Pärt for criticism.

Nearly all our famous composers have now seen their names blazoned across the ‘credit titles’ of what America calls ‘motionpictures.’ The plot may be moronic, the dialogue the most basic English, but the music may now scale the Olympian heights of classical austerity, or plumb the mazy depths of atonality and every other form of modern anti-romanticism. Gone are the days when studios shunned doctors of music like straphangers dodge the passenger sneezing in a tube. Counterpoint is no longer contraband, nor fugue verboten, a man may make a canon without being fired.

In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.

For me personally, Béla Bartók is the greatest composer of the first half of this century. I think that none of his contemporaries has so creatively enriched the three basic elements of music: harmony, melody, and rhythm, all three in balance, without neglect of any. And his range of expression extends all the way from gentle lyricism to violent, atavistic outbursts.

• Proms 2002 (1): Nørgård andTurnage Robert Stein

• Proms 2002 (2): Sawyer, Payne etc Martin Anderson

• London: Emigré composers Malcolm Miller

• Three Choirs Festival: Lionel Sainsbury's Violin Concerto Raymond Head

• Limousin: Roger Steptoe Malcolm Mille

I have been asked on a number of occasions recently whether I felt a heavy weight of responsibility during my work on Elgar's Third Symphony, and if this was an inhibiting factor. The question put me in a rather awkward situation, since a truthful answer was going to show me in a very immodest light. The fact is, my work on the project seemed to lie outside any feelings of awe and moral responsibility – because, quite simply, I was in love with the music and laboured for the sheer joy of it, without thought of ethical issues.

The summer of 1952 will mark the tenth anniversary session of the Berkshire Music Center. No one will find it strange, I suppose, if those of us who were with the school from the start feel that this is a moment for rejoicing. This by now well-known school of music was established in 1940 because the late Serge Koussevitzky persuaded the Trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to take an unprecedented step: the formation of a summer school under the aegis of a symphony orchestra. No one had ever before heard of such a thing. But it was the dream of our former director to find some tangible way for the older and more experienced musician to pass on a lifetime of experience to the young aspirant. Here talented young musicians might gather to engage in all kinds of ensemble playing and singing. Their very presence was to act as a stimulus among themselves and also to their teachers. Before long the plan was enlarged to include the departments of opera production, composition, and the study of the art of conducting. Beyond this—and here was a special love of Dr. Koussevitzky—a division of the school was to be set up for the musical enthusiast who wanted to spend a summer of “living and working in music.”

The musical climate of the 1920s, when Copland came to maturity, was not favourable to the use of popular or traditional material or idioms in ‘serious’ composition. Nationalism was no longer a powerful force in the Western world. Increased respect for folk-musics as cultural relics inhibited composers from using them freely as composition sources. Popular music was associated with commercial exploitation and the wooing of a mass audience on the lowest common level, serious music with uncompromising devotion to Art for Art's sake. The leaders of revolutionary movements—Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, each in different ways—upheld the negative principle that one must not walk where men had walked before. The melodic and harmonic idioms of serious and popular music were growing steadily apart, serious music concentrating its meanings, increasingly concerned with a microstructure in which every detail was to be personal and expressive, popular music freely accepting melodic and harmonic cliché as an integral part of the language. Serious music rejected exact repetition as a means of driving home the message, popular music was heavily repetitive. Serious music often depended on intellectual construction-methods not to be appreciated by the unprepared listener; popular music demanded that all meanings should be immediately apparent.

Bartók was constantly aware of the intellectual tendencies of his age and viewed with keen interest every aspect of contemporary life and thought. Naturally, his ideas affected his music; and since he confided most sketches of technical detail and many definitive statements of his musical problems to the keyboard, an examination of his body of works for the piano will afford us insight into the development of his idiom—as well as helping us to understand the evolution of contemporary music.

The structural significance of the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones is expressed in the following statements by Arnold Schoenberg in ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (Style and Idea, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, p. 107):

After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundation for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones which are related only with one another.

My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.

Strawinsky often surprises his admirers. When they believe themselves to have discovered his æsthetic aims or located his place in history, he suddenly escapes from their observant eyes to emerge on quite a different spot where nobody had suspected him to dwell. His most recent works, the Cantata on old English poems, the Septet, and the Shakespeare Songs, show a contrapuntal strictness of a very special kind, which he has never attempted before.