Are you like George III? Has each of us a little of George III lurking inside? Judging by the wild applause and shouts of ‘rubbish’, many of us have. The work struck home with some, at least. Some said that it was a shame to hold the old boy up to ridicule; for others he was not a historical person but an element of the human psyche placed in a historical setting, a Beckett clown whose words and actions have less meaning as a historical person's than they do as a multi-level poetic-psychological fantasy.

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.

Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set can be used in such a way that, even if restatements of one particular form are frequent, a different register, rhythm and timbral distribution will make it difficult to hear the restatement as repetition, at least before close analysis. Serial composers who retain the essentially traditional, pre-serial method of melodic or motivic identity are perhaps more likely to use repetitions which possess a clear similarity of shape as well as an explicit element of variation. Such a method can ensure the audibility of the evolving structure of a serial work, and also enable a composer to use designs involving tonal emphases without recourse to triadic formulae.

• Goehr's Konzertstück (Anthony Payne)

• Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side (Michael Chanan)

• Souster's Titus Groan Music (Robin Thompson)

• Three ‘Music Now’ Programmes (Tim Souster)

“Perhaps musically not bringing much new,” Ove Nordwall says about György Ligeti's Continuum for harpsichord solo—in a sensitive piece about the composer's output in the last issue of Tempo. I'm not so sure, though. It always depends on what we mean by new, of course, and our emotions are expert question-beggers: as soon as they like something it has something new, but when they dislike it they aren't slow to find its models.