Some unusual biographical and æsthetic interest may attach to a few manuscripts existing in the archives of the Paris office of Prokofieff's publishers. More than most composers, Prokofieff had the habit of revising and re-arranging his early compositions, and as in the new versions much of the original texture generally survived, he obviously attributed their original failure to corrigible technical shortcomings while continuing to believe in the maturity of his conception. Of the works here in question, the two short symphonic poems Rêves (Op. 6) and Esquisse Automnale (Op. 8), Le Cygne Blanc and Les Vagues (Op. 7) for female chorus and orchestra and the operas Magdalena (Op. 13) and The Flaming Angel (Op. 37), all but the last were written between 1909 and 1912, that is to say, before he left Russia for the first time. It is unlikely that in the circumstances of his hurried and unplanned departure he would have taken these scores with him and we may rather assume that he found them again, like the manuscript of The Gambler, when he first returned therein 1927. He then brought them back to Paris to re-write them there. This is all the more probable as the Sinfonietta, originally Op. 5 composed in 1909, the manuscript of which may have belonged to the same batch, actually appeared in Paris in a revised version in 1929 as Op. 48. Esquisse Automnale was re-arranged shortly before Prokofieff's definite return to Russia in 1934 and as there is much evidence of his intention to continue to visit the western world, the fact that these manuscripts remained in Paris does not mean that he wished to abandon them.

Hans Pfitzner was born in 1869 in Moscow—where his parents were temporarily residing—and is sometimes described as a German-Russian composer, although in fact he had no Russian blood. He grew up in Frankfurt o/M, where his father was Musikdirektor at the Municipal Theatre. From him he had his first music lessons, and perhaps the environment helped foster his interest in opera and music for the stage. He studied piano with James Kwast and composition with Ivan Knorr—the teacher of Cyril Scott and Percy Grainger—at Hoch's Conservatoire in Frankfurt. After finishing there, he took up the first in a series of teaching and conducting appointments which lasted until the advent of Hitler in 1933. These included a period as Director of Strasbourg Conservatoire, conductorship of the Kaim Orchestra in Munich, and frequent appearances as conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he also made very notable recordings, especially of the Beethoven symphonies—performances which rank with the finest I have ever heard. Strasbourg University honoured him in 1913 with the degree of Ph.D., and in the same year he was married—in Canterbury, Kent, to which city he and his bride had fled to avoid unpleasant entanglement with Percy Grainger, who considered himself a suitor for the same girl's hand.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a turning point in the history of modern music.

The excesses of the romanticists began to be unbearable for many. There were composers who felt: “this road does not lead us anywhere; there is no other solution but a complete break with the nineteenth century.”

Invaluable help was given to this change (or let us rather call it rejuvenation) by a kind of peasant music unknown up till then.

In a review of the first performance of James Clapperton's The Parliament of four Futtit Beistis, Jonathan Cross described the work's ‘blatant but effective modality’ as being ‘evidently an aspect of Clapperton's self-realignment with his Scottish roots’, and concluded, ‘whatever its origins, the end result is more effective than anything of his I have previously heard’.

These lines of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the great poet of Portuguese modernism, may seem at first sight to invoke the principal element of fado, Portugal's national music: the element represented by that famously untranslatable word suadade, implying longing, nostalgia, homesickness … However, they hide far deeper resonances. Mensagen (Message), the poetic sequence from which they come, is a profound exploration of Portugal's history, a modern counterpart to Camoens's great 16th-century epic The Lusiads. It is connected to the nationalist Integralismo Lusitano movement, and to Sebastianism. Other poets, particularly Mario Sa-Carneiro (1890–1916), and plastic artists, notably Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso (1887–1918) and Jose de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970), similarly reflect the strength of these patriotic and mystical ideas in Portugal during the country's deepening social crisis in the early part of the century. But Pessoa, who famously split himself into several persons, each with their own name, style and poetic output, may also stand as a symbol of the different currents Portuguese composers have ridden in search of their national identity.

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.

As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.

Apropos of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and its libretto, Gordon Crosse, in Tempo 85, submits that “an opera is a fusion of word, music and action in which, perhaps, only the music can bear separate scrutiny. W. H. Auden once described librettos as ‘private letters to the composers', and so they are”. On reflection and inspection, Gordon Crosse is much righter than Auden; as a matter of fact, he could hardly be righter. I'll take up the ‘hardly’ a little further down; for the moment, I want to rejoice that somebody has, at long last, said it. Crosse's may sound a slightly commonplace statement once it's out, but that is true of many propositions which hit the truth right at the centre.

During a visit to Scotland in 1970, I went for a holiday to Orkney: really just to see the things that everybody goes to see, such as the prehistoric stone circle remains and above all the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall—which, apart from being an extraordinary architectural monument, has musical associations. Those of us who have done music at university are familiar with the 12th-Century ‘Hymn to St. Magnus’, which was composed for that building. And so I went there and it was rainy and rather grim; but that you expect and put up with.

I First Met Friedrich Cerha and his wife Traude in December 1956. After a concert given by the International Society for Contemporary Music—at that time still considered a small group of conspirators—in a remote room at the Musikakademie, my mentor Hanns Jelinek took me to the Gmoa-Keller on the Heumarkt to introduce me to the leaders of Vienna's musical avant-garde.

After a period in which he had concerned himself with ‘free’ dissonance, Weill began, in 1926–27, to return to a harmonic language based on tonality. Many other composers were doing something of the kind at that time, and, like him, were associating a return to tonality with references to popular dance rhythms, whether traditional or modern. But whereas such figures as Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Milhaud tended to reject traditional harmonic usages, Weill proceeded to develop a largely triadic harmony, paring down his vocabulary to the most basic of chords and progressions. Although the power and originality of that harmony have been widely acknowledged, the technical issues have received little or no attention, at least in any published form. What follows is a preliminary and necessarily selective survey.

Songs without Voices, composed in 1991–2, is a set of four pieces for small instrumental ensemble comprising flute, cor anglais, clarinet, horn, piano, violin, viola and cello, lasting about eleven minutes. It follows on naturally from Knussen's Whitman Settings which preceded it, as three of its four movements derive their main melodic lines from purely instrumental settings of Whitman texts from the collection Leaves of Grass. Indeed the first movement's source text, Soon shall the winter's foil be here, is placed by Whitman in the collection immediately after The Voice of the Rain, the final text of Knussen's Whitman Settings.

St Albans: International Organ Festival 2005

Little can be said about music during the last century without encountering the men and women who supported it financially. Pierre Bourdieu's impression that the services rendered freely for the good of society reinforce a symbolic debt between giver and recipient complicates motivations behind patronage. Indeed, applying Bourdieu's theory to altruism in general – here, patronage in particular – highlights what could be thought of as a performance of futility: both giver and receiver understand the tenacious terms yet agree nonetheless to act out the process of reaching equilibrium. In the case of iconic music patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009), her support of the avant-garde seems, at times, to call into question on what side of this ‘performed futility’ she existed. This article considers ways in which Freeman's work as patron of the musical avant-garde allowed her to perform her identity as a woman and mother among a community on the fringe.

The idea of commissioning modern preludes to preface well established pillars of the classical repertoire has apparently been done a few years ago with soft new sounds gracing the air as audiences picnicked as a lead up to performances of Mozart's operas at Glyndebourne. Conversely one hears of The Departure of the Queen of Sheba, and other novelties. However, when conductor George Vass, musical director of the Presteigne Festival, commissioned three modern preludes to Handel's Messiah, to celebrate his tenth anniversary at the festival (2002), this must qualify as a ‘first’, and his brainchild. The Presteigne Festival is well known for its commitment to contemporary classical music. This was an ideal opportunity to commission three major British composers, to make their own 21st century ‘commentaries’ on Messiah, using the same instrumental forces available to Handel. As he also directs St Albans Choral Society, they put on the Messiah 25 October 2003, at St Albans Cathedral, prefaced by the three new preludes in the presence of two of the composers, Cecilia McDowall and David Matthews, using Orchestra Nova from the Presteigne Festival.

ELLIOTT CARTER: Steep Steps1; Two Diversions2; Oboe Quartet3; Figment No.24; Au Quai5; Of Challenge and of Love6; Figment No.17; Retrouvailles8; Hiyoku9. 1Virgil Blackwell, 2,8Charles Rosen, 3Stephen Taylor, 3Curtis Macomber, 3,5Maureen Gallagher, 3Eric Bartlett, 4,7Fred Sherry, 5Peter Kolkay 6Tony Arnold, 6Jacob Greenberg, 9Charles Neidich, 9Ayako Oshima. Bridge 9128

CARTER: Oboe Quartet1; Four Lauds2; A 6 Letter Letter3; Figments Nos.1–24. ISANG YUN: Piri5; Oboe Quartet6. 1,3,5,6Heinz Holliger, 1,2,6Thomas Zehetmair, 1,6Ruth Killius, 1,4,6Thomas Demenga. ECM New Series 1848/49