If civilised man continues long enough to achieve the retrospect, we may hope that he will be able to view with amusement—though perhaps with some mystification—our addiction to reading and writing around the arts in preference to living in them at first hand. In ages when nothing was to be gained by thousands' professing enthusiasms they did not feel, there was no demand either for the writer who could supply approved aesthetic reactions or for his colleague who dealt in impressive technical information as a defence against the suggestion that any reaction should be thought obligatory.

I can assure Mr. Iain Hamilton that the problem of the composer in facing up to serial technique is not nearly such a difficult one as the psychological problem posed by the coercive idealism of our time whether in music or any other sphere.

Like all idealists Mr. Hamilton overstates his case, when he writes, ‘Whereas one realises that a composer may pass through a period of the composition of some such works at a certain stage of his development, it seems strange that a composer can be content to remain in what is surely a dead world.’ ‘I also find it strange that one composer should be content to use another composer's hard-won style, and feel no responsibility that he must contribute something of his own if he is to meet the challenge offered to him.’

Benjamin Britten's secondary, but none the less significant and complementary, role as performer of other men's music is well known today and justly admired: his association—one might almost say his self-identification—with composers such as Mozart, Schubert, Wolf and Mahler, either as solo pianist, accompanist or conductor, are distinguished by a most compelling intensity of personal feeling for the music, objectified, as it were, by a cool, scientific clarity of musical presentation. His performances are supremely creative: the composer nourishes the performer in him, and vice versa, which provokes the reaction, as one admires an interpretative idea in the performance of a Mozart violin sonata or Schubert song partnered by Britten at the piano, ‘how Mozartian’ or ‘how Schubertian’ — and yet ‘how Brittenish’.

Like his father before him, Alexander Tcherepnin is a prolific composer. He is also a fundamentally conservative composer who contrives to sound ‘modern’. With this modernity he has often flirted, but it is not the real man. When he is, as in this latest symphony, uninhibited, he is a very attractive composer. When he is carrying out what he conceives to be the stem duty of keeping up with the times, he can be a disappointment. He imagines modernity, or the contemporary idiom (as if there were only one!), to involve the kind of dissonance that would have made our forefathers wince. Although he is not particularly happy with it, he supplies it on occasions. But, stern duty done, he relaxes and is himself, and then we get works such as this symphony, which still uses his ‘modern’ idiom, but not to the degree that it disguises his true manner of speaking. His ‘modern’ style rests in the effect of persistent, local Neapolitan sixths playing against a basically tonal harmony and thus emphasising the more the basic tonality—what was, until a little while ago, mistakenly called ‘polytonality’.