On 16 February the complete Lulu was heard in a live performance in Great Britain for the first time. It was heard, not seen. What was shown on the stage of the Royal Opera House was a farce by Götz Friedrich, superimposed on Alban Berg's music and libretto. Friedrich is an outstanding example of a type characterized by Arnold Schoenberg more than fifty years ago: ‘Producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something quite different’. Operatic production today seems increasingly to be based on the assumption that composers—who are inept, naïve, and indifferent to the dramaturgical aspects of the operatic theatre—compose music in a vacuum which it is the producer's responsibility to fill. But the music of an opera is not composed in a vacuum. The productive aspects of the work—entrances, exits, lightings, groupings, curtains, movements, the very thoughts and feelings of the characters—have their correspondences in the music. This is what it means to compose an opera.

Bartok's musical language may be approached from two points of view—one, in which the concepts and terminology are derived from folk-music sources, and the other, in which the concepts and analytical tools are derived from certain currents in contemporary music. The present essay is intended to demonstrate, through a study of selected pieces from the 14 Bagatelles for piano, opus 6 (1908), that the assumptions underlying both approaches are essential in understanding the evolution of Bartók's musical language, and that fundamental relationships exist between the diatonic folk modes and various abstract pitch formations commonly found in contemporary compositions.

The History of modern notation is the history of the stupefaction of our musical world which, enriched by an ever greater number of unmusical people (listeners, performers, and composers), has come to need a proportionate amount of superfluous information—superfluous, that is, for anybody who understands the music in the first place. Complex and problematic cases apart, Bach was still able to rely on our insight to the extent of letting the sheer structure of a piece dictate its tempo—whereas nowadays, the not so musical amongst us are unhappy without metronome marks, while the rest of us are unhappy about them. Again, Mozart's dynamics are extremely economical; many a dynamic change is firmly implied without being notated, and if we confined ourselves to his notated dynamics, an impossible, underplayed performance would be the result—which, in due journalistic course, would be described as ‘stylish’ by our critics.

Brian Dennis's output since 1973 is evidence of his fascination with Chinese poetry. During that time he has composed no fewer than nine cycles for voice and piano to his own versions of poems from the T'ang dynasty, showing a particular preference for the poets Wang Wei and Tu Fu. The musical development through these cycles owes as much to Dennis's response to the poetry as to any purely musical necessity. The poems became an obsession, the individual problems they posed the catalyst for each musical change.