The occasion for this article is the recent appearance of revised editions of two important works on serialism—Josef Rufer's Composition with Twelve Tones, first published in English in 1954 (now Composition with Twelve Notes, Barrie and Rockliff, 35/–), and George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality (subtitled ‘An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern'), which originally appeared in 1962 (Faber, 55/–). In addition I shall be referring to two recent events in London which proved to be stimulating contributions to the discussion of serialism: the seminars given by Milton Babbitt during the third SPNM Composers' Weekend, and a talk entitled ‘Schoenberg and the future’ given by Pierre Boulez as part of the South Bank Summer Music festival.

My title is, of course, a begging of at least half the question: we first have to diagnose the right notes as right before we can say that any of them are wrongly played—diagnose rather than merely find: no longer does the fact that a composer puts down a C on paper necessarily mean that he cares two hoots if a C sharp is played instead, or a C-semi-sharp for that matter. And even if he thinks he cares, one takes leave to doubt the profundity of his worries when, in rehearsal, one notices that he does not perceive the difference between the alleged right note and the wrong note he gets instead. Such tone-deafness may indeed be temporary, traumatic—especially if the composer is young, unused to rehearsal, frightened, nervous. But if it happens again and again, in all conceivable circumstances, the least that can be said on the sceptical side is that he must be overestimating the significance of his C qua C.

One of the persistent features of Peter Maxwell Davies's music has been the use of musical material borrowed from medieval and renaissance sources. His interest in the music of this period has not of course been in its abstract musical forms, which represent aesthetic ideals now unattainable, but in themes of faith and belief which it can be used to symbolise for us. Like Adrian Leverkiihn, the composer-hero of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, Davies is concerned with the dilemma that in a godless world, to create God after one's own image is to call up the devil.

• Maxwell Davies' Worldes Blis (Peter Lawson)

• Smalley's ‘Pulses’ and ‘Transformation I’ (Brian Dennis)

• Tavener's Celtic Requiem (Brian Dennis)

• Crosse's The Grace of Todd (Norman Kay)

• Some works by Babbitt (Graham Hair and Stephen Arnold)