Recently there has been a revival of interest in the music of Richard Strauss, and in Britain more attention has been paid to his lesser-known works. The symphonic poems such as Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, along with operas such as Salome, Etektra and Der Rosmkavalier, have never lapsed from the performance and recording repertoires. But the undeserved neglect of pieces such as the Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and operas that rarely reach the stage in this country, such as Die Frau ohne Schatten, has begun to be remedied. A new development which can be seen as both cause and effect of this revival is the appearance of books in English dealing with Strauss and his music. These include recent reissues of Norman del Mar's three-volume Richard Strauss: a Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (1962–72, reprinted with corrections 1978) and Michael Kennedy's Master Musicians volume reissued with additional material in 1988. The study by Willi Schuh, whom Strauss chose as his biographer, was issued in 1982 in an English translation by Mary Whittall entitled Richard Strauss: a Chronicle of the Early Years.

In the Introduction to his study of the Parry Collection of Yugoslav folk songs Béla Bartók contrasts ‘lexicographical’ and ‘grammatical’ principles in the systematic grouping of folk melodies. Although the former makes it possible to locate a melody by comparatively simple means, Bartók states, the latter is to be favoured; it is of higher importance “to get a clear idea of the relationship of melodies than to be able to locate them easily”. He then enumerates the components of his own grammatical system which, in order of weight, include: section structure, metric (syllabic) structure, rhythmical character, final notes of sections (caesurae), range, and so forth (cf. Plate 1 column headings).

Like many other composers, Andrzej Panufnik lost his entire musical oeuvre as a result of the Warsaw Uprising. By then he was already the composer of two symphonies, a piano trio, the Five Polish Peasant Songs and Tragic Overture. This last piece, which he had conducted himself in occupied Warsaw in 1944, had brought him considerable success. Listeners felt its terrifying resonance inaddition to appreciating its masterful construction, and the event remained in many people's memory for years, establishing Panufnik's musical position as a composer as well as a conductor. (Before the war, he had graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory with degrees in both fields, and later studiedconducting at Vienna's Hochschule fur Musik with one of the greatest conductors of the time, FelixWeingartner.) His pre-war compositions, premiered in the late 1930s, had already been very well received by the critics. There was no doubt that Panufnik would play a significant role in post-war Polish musical life.

Why the work of one composer survives and another doesn't remains a little mysterious. I myself incline on the whole to a Darwinian view of musical posterity: it is quality that chiefly determines the survival of the fittest, and some process of natural selection upon this criterion that ensures that the best are sorted out in the end. (If one throws in the other bit of evolutionist jargon—adaptation to one's environment—the limits to pursuing this metaphor become obvious). But temperamentally I distrust the endless discovery of Unjustly Neglected Composers. When the writer Mr. X is spoken of as ‘the persuasive advocate for’ composer Mr. Y, the phrase itself suggests the lawyer doing too good a job, and that the client so skilfully defended is in fact guilty—of lack of distinction anyway, if not lack of talent. There are so many Justly Neglected Composers. Every now and then, though, you make a discovery that upsets the comfortable applecart of this non-revisionist view of musical evolution.

I first bought a subscription to Tempo because I thought I ‘ought’ to do better at keeping up with contemporary music; but I continue to subscribe because I find it the most interesting reading on music I know. Informative, even inspiring, and my collection of CDs has grown in ways I never expected.

This article takes up Rebecca Saunders’ comments on the significance of timbre in her work to develop a timbre-centred analytical technique for two of her compositions, Ire (2012), for cello and ensemble, and Still (2011), for violin and orchestra. Two overarching principles are identified: the organisation of the pieces’ sounds into clearly differentiated categories, which can also overlap in different ways, and the use of a phrase-based logic in the pieces’ formal construction. Alongside the timbral construction, stable pitches acquire formal significance by virtue of their rarity and conspicuousness. I also elaborate on the ways in which perceptual ambiguity is fruitfully exploited in these works.

Despite an ever-expanding body of literature on Adès's engagement with the music of the past, his use of traditional formal models has attracted little critical comment. That which does exist privileges the relatively straightforward surface articulation of his musical forms over more nuanced accounts. In the case of Adès's sonata forms, this has had at least two consequences for our understanding of his music: first, that too strong an emphasis on syntactical groupings occludes what is happening discursively in the music; and second, that ‘textbook’ models are not the only formal tradition with which Adès's sonata forms engage. Rather, his sonatas bear traces of a rotational model that recalls the examples of Janáček and Sibelius. This article considers how Adès's sonata forms can be constituted not as neo-classical prefabrications but, a posteriori, as a practice that emerges across his career – from the Chamber Symphony and …but all shall be well to the Piano Quintet and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – from an interaction between traditional syntactical groupings, thematic procedures and tonal plots.