When Addressing a text to be set a composer will, at the extremes, offer it violence or reverence, and a sharp-edged exchange was committed to print in the 1960's concerning the correct relation between parole and musica when sentence (or stanza) is made cadence. In his Conclusion to Denis Stevens's A History of Song, Michael Tippett stated that one of the attributes of the song-writer was the ability to destroy all the verbal music of the poetry he set and to substitute ‘the music of music’. Five years later, in his contribution to the Festschrift for Tippett's 60th birthday, Peter Pears made a spirited denial of this ‘Mantis-like’ proposition: the composer should court his text, designing a musical structure compliant to his purpose while according the words the care of the poet whose art they first were. Behind this genteel shadow-boxing lay a wider issue: whether there were definable canons for the setting of English text (as exemplified by Benjamin Britten, since it was against his vocal works that the felicities and inflations Pears discerned in Tippett's 1943 cantata Boyhood's End and 1951 song cycle The Heart's Assurance were implicitly being measured) and whether Tippett's practice flouted them.

Barry Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987, a few hours after the first performance of his new chamber work, ARC. His hectic life-style with its incessant demands had burned him out. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but the real cause was exhaustion from years of overwork as a composer, teacher, concert organizer, ‘ghost’ writer, and pioneer in the dissemination of electro-acoustic music in this country. He was 52 years old and, sadly, just beginning to be recognized as a composer of international stature.

Few Musicians know of Imogen Hoist's work as a composer. She entered the R.C.M. in 1926, won an open scholarship for composition in 1927, the Cobbett Prize of 1928 with a Phantasy String Quartet, and an Octavia travelling scholarship in 1929. She was in league with the rising number of women musicians in London at the time, composing for the Anne Macnaghten Quartet, Victoria Reid and Sylvia Spencer among others; her works were performed and broadcast along with those of Lutyens and Maconchy. She was also developing her career as a pianist, undertaking much accompaniment work. Neuritis put an end to this, and, as she remained unmarried, she needed to find work to support herself financially. She joined the staff of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and began work as a school music teacher. An enormous quantity of arrangements ensued, most of which were published. As a result, her output became best known in the field of folk song arrangement, either for educational purposes or for the EFDSS. During the 1930's the only compositions she undertook were little pieces to help in her teaching. Her list of compositions did grow substantially in the following decade (during which she founded and directed the music department at Dartington), but the quantity and quality of them remained little recognized.

Since Benjamin Britten Died in 1976, attention has turned to performance of those of his works which were little-known in his lifetime. To my mind, this activity has been an unprecedented success, quite different from the barrel-scraping seen in the cases of certain other composers. Not only has there been added, in Paul Bunyan, a worthwhile stage work that will be widely performed, but the remarkably self-assured pieces of his teens which have now been heard, and in some cases recorded, have added music of real value to our experience. However of even greater interest, in my opinion, is the considerable quantity of incidental music that Britten wrote for films, plays, and radio productions: these are now the last source of substantial, unfamiliar scores by him.

In the two previous articles in this series (TEMPO 158 and 160) I examined how Holst became involved in Indian studies, and how his involvement essentially reflected a pattern of growing awareness of India in the West. The vedic hymns were a revelation to him, and obsessed him for several years. During this period (the first decade of the 20th century) Holst's ideas about music began to change: partly because he was in the process of rejecting his immediate musical past, and partly because he had discovered that an investigation of folksong and renaissance music might help him develop a more personal style. For a time the old and the new co-existed, often uneasily, as is especially evident in two of his major ‘Indian’ works—the opera Savitri, and the cantata The Cloud Messenger.