Having been a prey for so long to American initiative in the sphere of popular music, the English listener to serious American music tends either to seek out recognisably ‘popular’ elements (with welcome or disdain), or to affect an indifference which savours more of chauvinism than of aesthetic judgment. Aaron Copland, though accorded a degree of recognition, has necessarily suffered from this astigmatic view since so much of hismusic has been written for films and for folk-derived ballet. Works like the dance episodes from Rodeo and the orchestral piece Quiet City represent an earnest striving towards easy comprehensibility, and an acquaintance with their style, whether we find this stimulating or unduly attenuated, is a far from adequate basis for an estimate ofthe composer. The calibre of the lesser-known works written before he sought wider communication, though pointed out by his apologists, was too easily underestimated while he was offering more easily digested music, and even his present creative phase, in which he has struck a new stylistic balance, has not as yet changed the basis of his reputation.

Carlos Chávez is a composer before he is anything else. Although he has become known, in his native Mexico and elsewhere, as a conductor, administrator, and writer as well, he himself has regarded those other activities as adjuncts to, necessary extensions of (rather than substitutes for), his composing. For the academic year 1958–59 he is Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University. He will deliver the six required lectures. He is arranging concerts as part of his tenure of the honored professorship. But he undoubtedly regards the concerts, the lectures, and the book that will come out of them as integrally relevant to his continuing education and development as a composer.

One of the most disquieting features of the contemporary musical scene is that more composers than ever before are being ‘born out of their time’. There have been occasional examples before—Mendelssohn and Brahms, one feels, would have been more at home in the eighteenth century; but today the temporal exile is becoming a familiar figure, owing to the unprecedentedly swift development of musical language. From Debussy onwards, the characteristic twentieth-century composer has sensibly insisted that each new work shall break new ground, but by now this entirely healthy, forward-looking tendency has developed into an obsession with the new for its own sake. The restless technical curiosity of certain outstanding composers of high integrity, together with the pure snobbism of others, is bringing us perilously near the stage where each new work will amount to a complete stylistic revolution in itself.

In Berlioz's Aeneid the stage is, cumulatively, crowded, and the actors are concerned with a present or imminent crisis. There is no space for those emotional luxuries of events recollected in a leisurely and glowing context, on which Virgil was able to draw freely for one epic style. Aeneas is kept significantly on the move, noting rather than confronting a deteriorating situation at Troy, making his way up from a ‘scratch’ reputation at Carthage, letting himself go with Dido, being made to regret it, facing Dido for one awful interview, and eventually leaping to duty and his ship in a glow of religious patriotism, but without a theme to call his own. Nothing is left of the ‘I, Aeneas …’ with which he first revealed himself to an alien monarch. Nor does Berlioz exploit Cassandra's prophecies. Her visions of the new Troy, to which the whole drama leads, are peremptory and unrelated to the established patriotic theme (except for two distorted bars after Polyxena's suicide). The duty warnings of Hector and Mercury are equally uncoordinated. The orchestra underlines, without pursuing further, Dido's initial disturbance of spirit (dialogue with Anna). Her final greeting to death is prolonged but unreminiscent, apart from one phrase. The rest—Coroebus, Iopas, Hylas, sentries, Anna, Narbal—keep to their declared moods of male devotion, nature-worship, nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, match-making, politics, with more subtle but still impromptu examples of opposed motives in the ensembles. The peoples concerned move from one occasion to another, to smile or to frown. Orchestral interludes implement gaps for diversionary dance-drama and troop-movement.