Leopold Spinner died on 12 August 1980; and with him one of the few remaining direct links with the second Viennese school. Since the publication of my earlier two articles on Spinner's music, one or two more works have been published. There have been isolated performances; for example, the Sonatina for Violoncello and Piano has been performed, and it has also been broadcast in Austria; and the songs, op.8 and op. 16, were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 last year. But these serve only to emphasize the extent to which the musical world at the moment fails to notice the existence of a composer whose ideals are precision and economy of statement, development, and form; clarity of texture; and a syntax based on that ‘predominance and total engagement of motivic obligation as the structurally unifying factor in a complete fusion between traditional homophonic concepts and the strictest polyphonic presentation’ to which Spinner himself, speaking of Webern, referred. Not until we see that the communication of genuinely original musical thought and feeling is achieved by uncompromisingly personal extension of a tradition — and not by climbing onto one of the fashionable band-waggons (‘texture’, ‘systems’, allusion to or quotation of the more comfortable aspects of the 19th century, or whatever)—will we respond to Spinner's music. In the meantime, deaf to a significant individual voice and resistant to the possibilities of further development inherent in the language spoken by that voice, it is we who are the losers.

It has become a commonplace of musical historiography to point out that Charles Ives's experiments antedate the currency of most of the innovations of 20th-century compositional technique. But such a statement, when unsubstantiated by musical facts, understates the case, and leaves a vaguely derogatory impression of dilettantism. Ives accomplished more than merely experimenting with new techniques. He understood and assimilated the far-reaching implications of his innovations, saw their limitations and shortcomings, developed from them satisfactory and well-synthesized forms, and moulded them into a language to express his world view.

The performance of Havergal Brian's huge and rarely-heard First Symphony, The Gothic (?1919–27), on 25 May 1980 gave us a further opportunity to assess its value. In the past, adulation of the Symphony has been blended with strong criticism. Among the detractors have been those who were unable to follow the logic of a symphony that starts in D minor and ends in E major without (if one believes all that one reads) any good reason; and there have been those who found the opening movement too slight and episodic, too unsymphonic, for the weight cast upon it. It is time to re-examine these criticisms.