¹ Among the most notable of these may be counted Thomas Wilson (1927–2001), Thea Musgrave (b.1928), Alexander Goehr (b.1932), Hugh Wood (b. 1932), Justin Connolly (b. 1933), Harrison Birtwistle (b.1934), Peter Maxwell Davies (b.1934), Anthony Gilbert (b.1934), William Mathias (1934–1992), Bernard Rands (b.1935), Nicholas Maw (1935–2009), Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012), Anthony Payne (b.1936), David Bedford (1937–2011) Gordon Crosse (b.1937) and John McCabe (b.1939).

² Blake has described the effect of these early, disowned works as ‘like an English “Les Six”’ (Alan Blyth, ‘David Blake on musical fashions’, The Times, 18 August 1976, p. 5), perhaps a reference to their jocularity and penchant for lampooning, rather than to stylistic content, as he has never been drawn to Poulenc's music, for example.

³ This decisive step was first suggested by Alexander Goehr and facilitated by Alan Bush, who personally recommended Blake to Eisler.

⁴ In the 1961 Cheltenham Festival booklet's anonymous programme notes for this work, the third movement's ‘Alla Marcia’ (a marking which recurs in Blake's scores throughout his output) is described as ‘somewhat wry’, suggesting the composer's leanings towards irony, especially in connection with march-like material, were present before his encounter with Eisler, so that the latter may be said to have effectively sharpened and give point to a pre-existing tendency.

⁵ Recorded in 1969 for EMI by John Ogdon on his ‘Modern British Piano Music’ LP and released on CD in 2012 as part of a 17-disc set devoted to the great pianist (EMI 5099970463729).

⁶ According to Blake, who describes the Variations as ‘written with sweat and blood’, it took him six weeks to produce a theme Eisler would accept.

⁷ Reproduced in Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, Contemporary Music Studies, Vol. 9., ed. Blake, David (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p. 459Google Scholar.

⁸ Of which Blake was a founding member of staff, together with Wilfrid Mellers and Peter Aston.

⁹ Hanns Eisler died on 6 September 1962.

¹⁰ Single woodwind, two horns, trumpet, percussion and strings.

¹¹ The Musical Times, Vol. 111, No. 1526 (April 1970), p. 385Google Scholar.

¹² The lumina and usura forces and the Pound/Odysseus figure each have their own related note-row.

¹³ ‘David Blake’ in British Music Now, ed. Foreman, Lewis (London: Elek Books Ltd., 1975), p. 120Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Blake created a version for voice and chamber orchestra in 1973.

¹⁵ Consisting of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, harp and four solo strings.

¹⁶ For its revival at the ENO in 1983, the composer trimmed almost 30 minutes of music from the score and excised some marginal characters. However he has recently created a third, definitive version, reinstating these cuts.

¹⁷ Sonata alla Marcia is scored for two oboes, two horns and strings.

¹⁸ Così fan tutte was an acknowledged starting point for both Blake and Birtwhistle.

¹⁹ In order to set it apart, Blake originally considered writing this key central section of the opera in the language of jazz or with electronics, before ultimately deciding on casting it in a more tonal language.

²⁰ The solo cello piece Scenes (1972) was written for Welsh, a member of Blake's ensemble Lumina between 1980 and 1987.

²¹ Blake has a penchant for referencing, in his works, pre-existing material by other composers – there are examples in his Chamber Symphony, Scenes for solo cello and Clarinet Quintet, among others. In conversation with the present writer, Blake has acknowledged the powerful emotional impact on him when he first heard the short quotation from Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, op. 9 in Alexander Goehr's Little Symphony of 1963, though in his chapter on Blake in ‘British Music Now’ (London: Elek, 1975), Malcolm MacDonald suggests a possibly unconscious reference to the finale of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in Blake's First String Quartet, which predates Goehr's piece by one year.

²² Writing over 35 years ago of a situation that sadly still pertains in 2013, Malcolm MacDonald observed that Blake ‘is not active in London, which for the South Bank music scene and musical press is almost a way of saying he does not really exist’ (‘Revolution in Haiti’, Music and Musicians, Vol. 301, Issue 301, No. 1 (September 1977), p.32Google Scholar).

²³ In his Introduction to Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, xii.