Ten years ago when Europe had already experienced thirty years of experiment and achievement in the field of serial composition, there was emerging in Britain the first generation of young composers to have shown awareness of the revolution from the start. This time-lag, combined with a characteristically wary view of the latest continental developments, and naturally eclectic gifts, has borne fruit in a sensible but vital series of new styles and techniques—less liable, perhaps, in their innate conservatism, to achieve a visionary leap in the dark, but at the same time not prone to the excesses of some avant-garde experiments. Several of the young composers involved, Nicholas Maw among them, have shown facility in free atonal as well as twelve-note idioms and have tended recently towards a less rigorous application of serial methods. In fact in Britain at least the stage may well be set for a fulfilment of Krenek's prophecy—that the future development of atonal music will not depend on strict twelve-note regulation so much as on an instinctive preservation of the essence of the method.

Musical nationalism is sometimes looked on as a transient phenomenon, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and closely associated with political nationalism. But such a view is only a half-truth: national characteristics have had a way of turning up in the music of most ages, and we find them not only in periods of militant political nationalism and parochialism, but also, often to a striking degree, at times when frontiers seemed to imply no cultural barriers. Medieval civilization was international to an extent that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century; yet there is no mistaking the quintessential italianità of, say, Landini. The Italian and English madrigal schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries could be regarded as closely-related phases of one great cultural flowering; yet one need not look at the words to assign madrigals by Marenzio and Weelkes, or Gastoldi and Morley, to their respective countries.

From the expressive point of view, as was shown in the first part of this article the special quality of Lees's music is that it is concerned with the emotional unrest of contemporary life—the sense of violence, the feelings of doubt, discouragement, even despair—but while voicing these unflinchingly, it confronts them with a natural vitality which is not devoid of humour, courage, and hope. Seattle therefore made an appropriate choice when they commissioned him to write a large-scale choral work to open the ‘Century 21 Exposition’ of 1962. The result, Visions of Poets, was performed at the exposition on May 15 and 16, by Adele Addison (soprano), Albert da Costa (tenor), the Seattle Chorale and Symphony Orchestra, under Milton Katims. It was a spectacular occasion, the stage of the new Seattle Opera House being filled with a chorus of 90 and an orchestra of 95; the work created a profound impression, and was generally voted Lees's outstanding achievement to date.

If it has done nothing else, the revival of Britten's two ‘underground’ operas, Gloriana in a concert performance last November, and Billy Budd more recently at Covent Garden, has more than vindicated that small group of enthusiasts who stood out against popular opinion when the operas were first produced some ten years ago, and have since then resolutely insisted on the importance of both works. Many of us, I think, who had not seen or heard either Gloriana or Billy Budd until now, have been much too willing to accept without question the general, and as we can now see, misleading critical assessment that greeted their first appearance. But there can be no longer any doubt as to the distinctive position that these two compositions occupy within the canon of Britten's stage works, and certainly Billy Budd at least must be counted among the finest of his achievements.