‘It is Held, Upon all Hands’, wrote Lionel Johnson, ‘that to write about the works of a living writer is a difficult and delicate thing’. How much more difficult and delicate then to write of a composer who is very much living, and working, but no longer composing. As Howard Ferguson's decision to stop composing after 1959 would suggest, his music is the product of the fiercest self-criticism applied as much to the craft of composition as to the meaning. It is music of high purpose and devoted attention to the problem in hand.