The attribution of influence in music – usually, the influence of one composer on another – is a notoriously slippery business, one whose results are apt to seem arbitrary and impressionistic. Recently musicologists, inspired by the example of Harold Bloom in literature (The Anxiety of Influence, 1973, and several subsequent works) have tried to make the study of influence more rigorous. This has sometimes meant the setting up of a formidable theoretical apparatus, the complexity of which can make one lose sight of the simplicity of the musical relationships involved. The pursuit of theory easily becomes an end in itself: as one commentator has observed, references to Bloom, in such discussions, have now become more or less de rigueur, with authors rushing to demonstrate their familiarity with misprision, revisionary ratios and other Bloomian categories. As will be apparent, I am not primarily interested in influence as a matter of anxiety: influence when it shows itself is usually obvious enough (by which I mean obvious to the ear), and the obviousness of the connexion tends to make it uninteresting and further discussion redundant.