Arthur Benjamin endured two serious disabilities. He had conquered a large part of the listening world with an enchanting brevity (Jamaican Rumba). And he was an unashamed Romantic. By these two circumstances, rather than on evidence of greater validity, he was assessed. The first enormously extended his popular fame but reduced his stature in the view of high-powered criticism. The second appeared to make him an anachronistic figure.

Seiber was a close personal friend of mine—all the closer for having been a close musical friend. Musicians are lonelier nowadays than people. And genuine musicians, those who don't lie to themselves, are loneliest, because in many ruling circles the self-lie has become a professional must—all the more frantic for remaining unacknowledged.

When the International Conference of Composers opened in Stratford, Canada, in August, a welcome sense of naivety and new world vibrancy seemed to make it distinct from its old world counterparts in the various centres of Europe. It was obvious from the beginning that an attempt was being made to encompass many aspects of modern techniques both in the announced panels for discussion and in the selection of works to be performed.

I am sure that many composers here today would agree with me that a separate session on serial music is somewhat dangerous. It suggests that it is some other form of composition and that its problems are something apart. In 1960 few would deny the validity and power of music which is not tonal. If one fails to accept the great new forces of our time, one is not actually living in our time. If one seeks to ignore or ridicule such great forces as the struggle for racial equality or communism, or if one fails to acknowledge to oneself that we live in an Atomic age and that much of our thought and life is bound to be conditioned by it, if we by-pass these real issues and developments, then we lose the stimulation of our age. Whether we are in agreement with what has resulted from these forces or how they have been managed is another matter and of less importance than the fact that we should recognise them for what they are. Acceptance of, but not necessarily capitulation to, such great forces implies courage and an open mind. From such an acceptance could follow a possibility that the best results might be encouraged. But in saying that, I presuppose a great many things amongst which open-mindedness and a true enthusiasm for new ideas are not the least important. This panel session deals with just such a great force in the creative musical thought of our century and in this paper I shall deal with what seems to be the crux of the problem of creative musical thought today. I shall deal with no great technicalities or obscurities but try to show you how I personally feel that the great forces set in motion by Schoenberg, and developed by Webern, have done more than anything to face squarely the great dilemma which exists in music today.

Andrzej Panufnik was born in Warsaw on September 24, 1914. His father, Tomasz, was the most eminent Polish constructor of stringed instruments, and author of many scientific books concerning the construction of musical instruments. Some of his books are in the library of the British Museum. Tomasz influenced in many ways the early musical ideas of his son, and this influence has lived on in one way in Andrzej's mature musical output. His father at first designed his instruments on the old Italian model—‘Antica’ was his name for them. He also later designed a new type of violin which he called ‘Polonia’—the Polish instrument. Andrzej's mature music falls into three categories: ‘Antica’, music based on compositions by seventeenth-century Polish composers, ‘Polonia’, music based partly on original Polish folk tunes, and ‘Independent’, music which he calls unrelated, free, but which at times does reflect the other two in spirit, simply because he cannot alter his nature. The works in this latter class have no direct connection with either of the other two.

Tovey once suggested that Brahms was so jaundiced a self-critic as to have destroyed a sheaf of works scarcely distinguishable in quality from those we know. Whether or not Brahms was justified in remaining for so long uncommitted to a declared solution of the symphonic problem, his caution helped to magnify that peculiar sanctity with which the nineteenth century sought to invest the symphony. The relaxation in which he was then able to work out another vein of thought is an obvious characteristic of the symphony he completed only one year later; a decent interval of six years preceded his third essay. Though the large output of Bohuslav Martinu marks him out as one of the most prolific, and at times least self-critical, composers of our century, he too seems to have been reluctant to approach symphonic structure. Apart from a rather mystifying piece originally entitled La Symphonie (a descriptive rather than structural title, later changed to Rhapsody), he did not venture near the medium before he was fifty-one, but then wrote four in as many years, a fifth after two years, and a final symphony after another six years. We may feel that his initial spurt of composition in the one medium has tended to make those works too similar, and has served to confuse and discourage a public anxious to recognise symphonies as sporadic but particularly significant milestones in a composer's career.

Bartók was one of the giants of 20th century music. Yet the ‘Bartókiana’ associated with his life and works is of surprisingly modest dimensions. The fact that he has now been dead for fifteen years would tend to invalidate the possible excuse of an insufficient historical perspective. Admittedly, his life cannot be discussed with all its details completely filled in, but such is not the case with his music. None the less, his art, viewed in its totality, has not attracted the attention it unquestionably deserves: we are still baffled and mystified by certain aspects of his style and, to a slightly lesser extent, by facets of his technique.

At the Venice Festival this year the first performance was given of Stravinsky's Monumentum pro Gesualdo Venosa ad CD Annum. This consists of three of Gesualdo's five-part madrigals, ‘re-composed for instruments’ by Stravinsky. The madrigals he has chosen are ‘Asciugate i begli occhi’ (Book V, No. 15), ‘Ma tu, cagion di quella’ (Book V, No. 18), and ‘Belta poi che t'assenti’ (Book VI, No. 2). Stravinsky's full orchestra for the work consists of two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and strings without double basses, but he uses no trumpets or trombones in the first madrigal, and no horns or strings in the second.