Ernst Krenek is the subject of the first chapter of John Rockwell's stimulating survey All American Music, but this is no compliment to the composer. He is described as ‘one of the last of a line of European immigrants who enriched our music but also suppressed the nascent evolution of a truly American culture’. This seems rough justice from a country which has been nurtured on generations of imported cultures, fed into a developing and eventually unique main stream, but one can see Rockwell's point about the enormous prestige of serialism. Forty years after his emigration, it is possible to wonder whether even Stravinsky, via Craft, was adversely affected by the powerful establishment fashions of his American context. And Copland? It is becoming commonplace now, especially in architecture, to regard some of the manifestations of modernism as, quite simply, a mistake.