The Webern Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel holds a fair copy of an early version of the Drei Stücke für Streichquartett (1913), comprising the song ‘Schmerz, immer Blick nach über’ together with what later became numbers 1 and 6 of the Sechs Bagatellen op.9. This document is highly interesting on many counts: here I will mainly discuss one, the existence of a discarded ending to the third piece (later op.9 no.6). This passage is heavily blacked-out in mauve pencil in the manuscript, but the notes, dynamics and indications can be discerned with a strong light and magnifying glass.

PN: We talked about fractals in connexion with the infinity row–this way of letting music grow in what you could call open hierarchic layers. It's not a director and a slave; it's an interdependent way of producing music. If you choose a scale — for instance, the chromatic scale — it contains itself an infinite number of times; my Second Symphony is based on realizing this characteristic. But if instead of letting it move in this expansive way, where you get wider and wider waves, you then construct it in the opposite way, you get a figure where it never gets out of itself. But it creates still a fractal rhythmic figure, which was very inspiring for me in all my percussion music from the 1970s. I discovered that feature in the beginning of the 70s when I composed the Third Symphony. I found the infinity row at the end of the 50s, but it was not until I had composed the Third Symphony and some works before it that I realized it contained its dark side, which is just as rhythmic and just as hierarchic. In my Third Symphony it comes out like an inevitable development. If you imagine the place in the beginning where it gets up to a very high trill, it comes in lower at half-tempo, and then again more slowly further down. It contains itself, like a Russian doll or a Chinese box.

In a recent article on Freud for the Guardian Review, AC Grayling wrote: It is characteristic of highly speculative enquiries that the thinkers who most influence them are those who find the most compelling vocabulary — one which offers a new way of expressing and articulating its subject.

• Notes from Webern's Classes Michael Graubart

• Maurice Ohana Peter Palmer

• Proms 2002 (1): Nørgård andTurnage Robert Stein

• Proms 2002 (2): Sawyer, Payne etc Martin Anderson

• London: Emigré composers Malcolm Miller

• Three Choirs Festival: Lionel Sainsbury's Violin Concerto Raymond Head

• Limousin: Roger Steptoe Malcolm Mille

• Lachenmann's ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’ Arnold Whittall

• Beat Furrer and Olga Neuwirth Ivan Hewett

• Matthijs Vermeulen's Symphonies Paul Rapoport

• Silvestrov, Kancheli, Gubaidulina Peter Quinn

• The Schoenberg Quartet's Schoenberg Mark Doran

• Regina Irman Peter Palmer

• Gerard Schurmann Bret Johnson

• The Schoenberg Quartet's Zemlinsky Lloyd Moore

• Contemporary British Round-up Guy Rickards

• Sorabji and Hinton: premières and recordings Martin Anderson

• Friedrich Cerha Documented John Warnaby

On p.64 of the July issue, in the course of a record review devoted to the music of Hugh Wood, Calum MacDonald remarked that Scenes from Comus Showed ‘it was Wood who arrived first at much that would recnr in Maw's publishers have gently reminded us that Scences and Arias was first performed at the Proms in 1962, Scenes from Comus in 1965. Although the published form of Scenes and Arias dates from 1966, there is no question that it was the earlier work, and MacDonald's remark, inadvertently made, is in error. Apologies are due to both composers.