Everyone knows that Bartók's compositions were strongly influenced by his work with folk music. For over 70 years commentators have repeated the fact in one form or another. Bartok himself noted shortly before his death: ‘It is almost a truism that contemporary art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis. However, there is much misunderstanding and misinterpretation with reference to the relation between our higher art music and our rural music’. That ‘misunderstanding and misinterpretation’ was not entirely the fault of scholars and critics. Bartók's numerous essays on the subject, written between 1911 and 1944, all too often provide the reader with generalities. Where he is specific it is most usually about thematic, or occasionally harmonic, derivations from folk sources. With the exception of portions of the ‘Harvard Lectures’ (1943), however, Bartók avoids any sustained account of how folk music influenced the modal and tonal structures of his compositions. Above all, he never explains the principles behind his characteristic pitch notations, particularly those double sharps and double flats so frequently found in his scores.

Like his contemporaries Nigel Osborne and John Casken, Geoffrey Poole (born 1949) is among the most promising voices of his generation. Yet he is not so well known as either of them—despite commissions from the BBC, Hallé, and Kings' Singers, the recording of a major work, many broadcasts, and his winning the Clements Prize and a Radcliffe Award. Possibly this situation arose because Poole didn't gain a publishing contract early in his career, but that has had its advantages since it allowed him the opportunity to develop his personal style away from the limelight.

My previous article on Berthold Goldschmidt (in TEMPO 144) dealt with the basic facts of his career, a career that received a severe setback when Hitler came to power in 1933 and Goldschmidt's music was banned in his native Germany. There seems little doubt that, had the Nazis not taken over, Goldschmidt, an up-and-coming young composer with a publishing contract from Universal Edition and an opera about to be staged in Berlin, would have consolidated his early success and become a prominent figure in German musical life. As it is, his music is at present scarcely played at all, and the works I shall discuss here are either long out of print or unpublished. I believe Goldschmidt's music to be of high quality and his neglect totally unjustified, but only performances of his work—and especially of his two operas—will substantiate my personal conviction.

In polish music since 1945 we can certainly see the political, linguistic, literary and religious interests of most Polish composers as part of a larger picture—a re-emergence which has generated many new techniques that are of world-wide significance. One of the main players on this stage was Kazmierz Serocki (1922–1981) who left a large body of work which commands our respect and admiration. Serocki's work as a composer, like that of Lutoslawski and Baird, underwent many subtle and interesting changes that reflect the course of musical composition in Poland since 1945, marked by a movement we could describe as ‘toward spatial sonoristics’.

Elisabeth lutyens has left a vacuum which will not be easily filled. Her single minded and highly idealistic devotion to her art gives us all a standard to which to aspire, and although her ideals sometimes made her embittered with the musical world, her accurate observation and criticism of changing values made her a latter-day prophet who did not always cry wolf. And yet, as we all know, she was by no means a reactionary.