¹ Actually including one living Sino-Scot and certain dead or brain-dead American cranks, phoneys and charlatans, and their hangers-on.

² The European première of the Piano Quintet and London première of the complete Sytnplumia, conducted by Oliver Knussen. The date was 28 November.

³ It was ironic to see Carter and Boulez on film, gently arguing about the separate management techniques of conductor and composer in conning/persuading orchestra players to do as they are told.

⁴ Since current musicology remains stuck at a pre-Darwin or pre-Mendeleyev stage – i.e. there is not yet even the beginning of the idea of a general or ‘transformational’ musicology – we still have no terms to deal with common everyday issues in music. In this context, what word will describe whatever it is that modal thinking and ‘classical’ tonality have in common?

⁵ Each of them has drawn up long tables of chords classified in various ways without an explanation of what they are there for or how they work. They look like the tables worked out in the 16th century by Zarlino and his contemporaries, which are 2–3 pages long and tell you what notes may go above which other ones. Nowadays we can express all this in one word: ‘triads’

⁶ The Music of Elliott Carter, revised edition (1998), Faber & Faber Google Scholar.

⁷ But it is frustrating that, in the exhaustive list of Carter's works, there no mention of some of his earlier compositions which one would really like to know about – does he disown them? – a flute sonata, madrigals, Oratorio (a setting of Hart Crane's Tlie Bridge – which later became the major inspiration for his Symphony of Time Orchestras), a concerto for cor anglais, a ballet: Tlie Ballroom Guide, two operas: Tom and Lily and One-act Opera.

¹ At the Conway Hall, London, 11 September, 2 October, 11 December and 8 January.

* I reported on Rodion Shchedrin's witty Four Russian Songs and Gerard McBurney's exultantly violent Letter to Paradise in Tempo 206.