As the 1980s draw to their close, contemporary music is becoming more eclectic than ever before. In the tremendous range of idioms, from symphonies to synthesizers via many ‘isms’ and ‘neos’, composers of the younger generation have a baffling choice of directions for their preferred moves. Ideologies have altered considerably during the past two decades; the demands of technology have left some institutions unable to keep up with the progress of electronic music in others; now the early musical experience of children in schools is changing too, with the introduction of GCSE placing emphasis on creativity and composition. But amongst the changes some aspects of a composer's training remain unaltered. There is a general sense that composers are ‘born and not made’, although they can be helped – or hindered – by their teachers. As Professor Alexander Goehr remarked: ‘I can teach anybody to compose so long as they are not a composer’. The mechanics of composing, such as formal structure or writing counterpoint, can be taught; the source of inspiration is as inexplicable as ever. The young composer remains something of a rebel figure, with a need for a particular means of self-expression that can be shaped but not dictated to. The rudiments of harmony and counterpoint, form and orchestration, can all be explained and absorbed by the student. But for a gifted composer in training, the essential search remains for the individual voice which must be found through independent choices, under the careful guidance of a good teacher.

Vagn Homboe, born in Horsens on the Jutland peninsula in 1909, is the doyen of Danish composers. Although he celebrates his eightieth birthday on 20 December, he remains formidably productive: his new Twelfth Symphony was premièred by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra in Cardiff on 21 October. A prolific composer in many genres, his reputation rests securely on the twin pillars of his symphonies and his even more numerous string quartets.

‘An obsessive investigation of desire… a perpetual elegy on the death of possibility’ was a judgement made of Thomas Hardy's life and art, but it is no less exact a description of John Ireland's conscious or unconscious creative impulsions. Obsession and elegy may be traced in Ireland's vocal music from the early settings published as Songs of a Wayfarer in 1912 through the ‘out-of-door’ songs such as When lights go rolling round the sky (1911) and the first Hardy cycle (1925) to the bleak introversion of the second Housman cycle (1926–7), no less than in the fastidious selection of poets whose ‘uncoloured truth[s]’ were most clearly able to express them.

In his review of Nicolas Slonimsky's autobiography (Tempo 167, p.47) Paul Rapoport pointed out that it was erroneous to state that Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasilieras were written for piano (as Michael Round's article in Tempo 169 will have confirmed). But at least Slominsky did not call them Brasileiras bachinanas, which was the title that appeared in the review: and neither did Paul Rapoport. For that particular error, Tempo itself must take the blame, and render its apologies to both authors.