• Recent Messiaen books Robert Fallon, Christopher Dingle

• Essays by Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood Stephen Walsh

• Rzewski's ‘Nonsequiturs’ Clemens Gresser

• John Coltrane and Jazz Songs Rodney Lister

• Maurice Duruflé Bret Johnson

The eclectic taste of Thomas Adès has led writers to comment upon the plethora of influences in his music. Adès himself has made no secret of such composers, frequently performing the works of those who have been a particular source of inspiration to him. While the present study initially acknowledges this vast array of disparate styles, the second section considers the extent to which Adès is influencing himself. It identifies certain trends that are evolving across his oeuvre, and central to this is the distinctive treatment of a pair of intervals, evident in the opening bars of almost a quarter of his published works to date.

While the influences of others remain undoubtedly significant to any discussion of Adès, it is now also appropriate to examine the way in which some of the composer's own characteristic gestures form musical relationships between his works.

Vaughan Williams' inspired attacks on musical history in The Making of Music (London, 1955) have come in for some heavy censure. “There is no physical reason,” he writes, “why an 18th-century composer should not have written the whole of Strawinsky and Schoenberg, provided that he had the pen and paper.” “Only the same reason,” Martin Cooper comments, “that prevents a monkey with a typewriter producing Hamlet.”

This article arose from the author's review of Daniel Albright's recent study Untwisting the Serpent – Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press). The review, now published in the Spring 2001 Issue of the Kurt Weill Newsletter (vol 19, no. 1), concentrates on Schoenberg and Weill, while the article explores other aspects of Modernism considered by Albright. Tempo's own formal review of Untwisting the Serpent is contributed by Peter Quinn on p. 00 – Ed.).

Herbert Howells said that the one experience which stood out as a vitally determining factor in his life was his first encounter with Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. ‘It was after then that I felt I really knew myself, both as a man and artist. It all seemed so incredibly new at the time, but I soon came to realize how very, very old it actually was, how I'd been living the music since long before I could ever begin to remember’. This paradoxical combination of the new and the old in Vaughan Williams is worth investigation, and its effect on Howells's own music awaits full exploration. The present article can do little more than introduce the topic, but it will have served its purpose if it points the way to further investigation.

When Heinrich Ströbel commissioned Olivier Messiaen to write a new piece for the Donaueschingen Festival, he took care to specify that the piano and the ondes martenot were to be strictly forbidden. (‘Attention, Messiaen! Cette-fois-ci, pas d'onde, pas de piano!’) Such a specification is liable to be read as a measure taken to guard against any possible revival of the sound-world of Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8). In an effort to surpass the achievements of Turangalîla, however, Messiaen had moved rapidly and decisively in the intervening years. Brief periods of teaching at Darmstadt and Tanglewood led to an obvious surge of experimental works, followed by Réveil d'oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) and Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–8), his first attempts at composing primarily with bird songs. With the completion of Chronochromie (1959–60), the aesthetic stance of most of the ensuing works was firmly in place.

This article presents a view of the first meetings between the oboe virtuoso Christopher Redgate and the composers Dorothy Ker and Fabrice Fitch. The article details some aspects of these meetings to highlight the processes that are at play in the earliest stages of collaboration. These processes are both practical (in which information about how the oboe works is uncovered and shared) and philosophical (in which the oboe itself becomes a significant source of new possibilities). The article traces a period during which Redgate was developing a new oboe, working with composers to create new repertoire for the new instrument. Arguing for closer attention to the ‘everyday’ aspects of composers and performers working together, the article explores some of the ways in which Redgate pulls apart his experience of performing to develop new technique and to opening up new possibilities for future composition. I also argue that the oboe, as much as the composer and performer, plays a part in shaping musical outcomes.

The project of introducing an unknown repertory into discourses on music can be approached in a range of ways. The writer can make a case about its regrettable neglect and its unjustified exclusion from a historical canon, or can argue for its (political) relevance to the present. Or s/he can simply try to persuade readers of its aesthetic qualities: this third desire might well drive the first two, however covertly. The path I take here is unabashedly more ambitious. In attempting to open the hearts and minds of the uninitiated reader to a composer little-known outside Switzerland and Hungary, I will suggest that he offers us a significantly new way of thinking about music history in the 20th century as a whole.

HARVEY: Passion and Resurrection. BBC Singers, Sinfonia 21 c. Martin Neary. Sargasso SCD28052.

Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.

Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet, ‘before the universe was born’, is a shining example of his radical compositional approach. With an intense interest in creating a rich, numinous sound-world constructed firmly on principles of nature, science and ancient philosophy, Radulescu developed a unique compositional language that breaks with traditional musical conventions. In hopes of illuminating the inner workings behind his often enigmatic compositional process, this article examines various aspects relating to Radulescu's Fifth Quartet: the work's formal construction, with a focus on its notation and overall large-scale harmonic development; the Quartet's rhythmic devices and their link to the philosophical underpinnings that drive the work; the extended instrumental string techniques employed throughout, the sounds they achieve, and how they are executed; and the work's spectral pitch organisation.

This article is a reflection on aspects of the compositional practice and aesthetics of the American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987) as viewed from the perspective of a fellow composer. Writing as a colleague immersed in Feldman's work for more than three decades, Kevin Volans discusses Feldman's concepts of time and form; his approach to touch on the piano, and to instrumentation and tone colour generally; his relationship with the visual arts; his notational practices with regard to pitch and rhythm; his anti-conceptualist standpoint, and much else.

This article investigates the tension between originality and success for ‘emerging composers’ involved in composition opportunities in the British contemporary classical music scene. It utilises survey responses from 47 new music composers to better understand their experiences of these very public signs of compositional success. Though the narrative of the original artist is still significant, conflicts arise between ‘uniqueness’ and the realities of the composition opportunity. Composers aspire to be original, but are aware that a number of other, more instrumental, factors play a crucial role in being chosen. Despite the continuing importance of opportunities to many composers’ development, there are areas that could be made more transparent to ensure they are benefitting an aesthetically diverse range of artists.

Barry Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987, a few hours after the first performance of his new chamber work, ARC. His hectic life-style with its incessant demands had burned him out. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but the real cause was exhaustion from years of overwork as a composer, teacher, concert organizer, ‘ghost’ writer, and pioneer in the dissemination of electro-acoustic music in this country. He was 52 years old and, sadly, just beginning to be recognized as a composer of international stature.

Close examination of John Adams's oeuvre reveals that symmetry is one of the predominant features of his music. Three common types of symmetry are encountered in Adams's works: reflection, translation and rotation. This article investigates these symmetries and tracks their development throughout Adams's compositional career. An analysis of selected works from the 1970s (China Gates and Phrygian Gates), 1980s (Grand Pianola Music and Fearful Symmetries) and 1990s (the Violin Concerto and Century Rolls) highlights the most pervasive symmetry in each decade and shows a shift from preconceived overarching symmetries that frame entire musical structures to smaller-level symmetries that affect the music at a level of phrase and motivic structure.

Many words have been written on the subject of symmetry in Bartók, prompted by the abundance and variety of examples of the phenomenon to be found on the music's ‘surface’. As yet, however, the fundamental stasis of symmetry and the dynamism for which Bartók's music is noted have not been adequately reconciled, irrespective of what kind of symmetry has been examined – spatial, formal, or pitch-class. One of the problems regarding work in the first of these categories has been that analysts have tended to examine excerpts rather than complete spans of music. Thus while Jonathan Bernard proposes that there is in Bartók a ‘hierarchy of relationships in which smaller symmetries contribute to larger ones, which in turn contribute to even larger ones, and so on, across ever larger spans of time’ – a theory which has the potential, at least, to account for dynamic aspects of the music – his concern only with incomplete spans limits the effectiveness of his approach.

A Michael Finnissy work is like a journey from one point to another, along which there are any number of digressions off the ‘main path’, some of them extended. By the end of this journey, one realizes that the digressions were far more interesting than the conclusion: indeed the journey primarily served the purpose of enticingone into the space in question. As a ‘guide’ through the near 200 works that occupy Michael Finnissy's catalogue in the year of his 50th birthday, I shall take the liberty of constructing ‘paths’ of my own: after all, there are an infinite number of such paths, and though none will lead us through the oeuvre in its entirety, I wish to give some impression of the sheer scope and stimulation of Finnissy6s body of work.