The music of Peter Maxwell Davies has recently undergone a remarkable rebirth—a transformation all the more remarkable for taking place in a country (England, if anyone is unsure) where the breath of life rarely enters most composers' works from the start. There is widespread confusion among English critics and writers about music as to what constitutes originality in music, a confusion most succinctly and ludicrously summarised by Mr. Ernest Tomlinson in the first part of his article ‘Light Music in the Modern World’ (Composer, Spring 1967). Mr. Tomlinson's article was primarily about light music, but at this point, as I understand him, he was writing generally about all modern music:

Born into a musical family in 1914, Andrzej Panufnik began composing at the age of nine, made rapid and distinguished progress through the Warsaw Conservatoire, and then went abroad for further study in Paris, London and Vienna (including conducting lessons from Felix Weingartner). At the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned to Warsaw and devoted himself to composition, as far as this was possible in an atmosphere poisonous to artistic creation; he also composed patriotic songs under a pseudonym, and participated as a pianist in prohibited underground and charity concerts. In the Warsaw uprising in 1944 all that he had written up to then was destroyed, but the collapse of Germany and the removal of the Nazi occupation brought the seeming promise of a fresh start under a new regime. Panufnik was appointed permanent conductor of the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra, and then of the Warsaw Philharmonic. From that time on he travelled extensively, conducting every leading European orchestra. Further honours and decorations came his way from the new Poland, where he was esteemed as one of the country's leading composers and conductors. In spite of this he felt unable to accept political intervention in artistic matters, and in 1954, as a protest, he left Poland to emigrate to England. Here too he has been active both as a composer and as a conductor, and for two years (1957–59) he was permanent conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra, but now gives most of his time to composition.

In the uncertain panorama of today's music, few indeed are the composers who appear able to set their course as though by an infallible compass. Among those few, Alberto Ginastera is an outstanding example. During thirty years of professional life, his compositions reveal a progression of unbroken continuity and logic. When, therefore, in 1962 at the age of 46, he was commissioned by the Municipality of Buenos Aires to compose his first opera, Don Rodrigo, he was fully prepared for this major task, and created a lyrical and dramatic work in which all the elements of his creative personality are merged.

David Simmons, introducing a recent concert of advanced works at the Purcell Room, has tried a frontal attack on the problem of contemporary music; but the trouble is that the attack, meant as a piece of propaganda, is a shade more problematic than the problem. There's hardly a sentence in the piece that I can swallow whole—and as for the virginal listener, he may have found the difficult music easier than the words that were intended to ease the way. Are we not, in fact, talking too much, all of us? You may ask, what's too much? Well, everything that is not submitted as demonstrable truth. I don't mean the whole truth, of course; what I do mean is nothing but the truth. At this problematic stage in musical history, it's cumbersome enough to have to take a lot of musical gas on the off-chance that it mightn't be gas; but to have to take gas about gas in the hope that you will be able to read sense into one or both of them is a bit of a task—and a task is something which culture, natural culture, shouldn't be.