In progressing from the Lowell-like title of Life Studies to the Pound-like title of the three piano pieces that make up Personae, Nicholas Maw reinforces the importance he has come to attach to an element of enigma. Just as we are naturally curious about whether or not such titles allude, Elgar-like, to specific individuals, so the musical fabric itself intrigues by its range of reference, its hints, suggestions, implications. But whereas we might well be none the wiser if we knew to whom, if anyone, Maw's titles referred, a study of the music itself can teach us much about the power of individual pitches to create the widest structural perspectives, as they interact in elaborate chromatic configurations.

Peter Maxwell Davies's Symphony is substantial enough to have prompted an intensive study of the score, and problematic enough to have prompted this essay. ‘Problematic enough’ is not a tactful or cowardly euphemism for ‘bad enough’, though it might just be a euphemism for ‘uneven enough’: we shall see. In any case, to talk of problems here is the most objective approach as well as the most honest: initially, at any rate, it leaves the question open whether the problem is Peter Maxwell Davies's or mine or, most likely, a bit of both.

‘I have the greatest regard for Goehr, but I think his music gets worse and worse,’ one of our senior chroniclers of the avant-garde remarked to me some five years ago: ‘First it was neo-expressionism, then neo-romanticism, now it is neoclassicism—where will it end?’ To be fair, the same speaker has since endorsed with delight Goehr's setting of Psalm IV (1976). Moreover, any indictment of backsliding from historical necessity has been complicated, for instance, by the composition of the ‘expressionistic’ Symphony in One Movement (1970) two years after the ‘romantic’ Romanza for Cello and Orchestra (1968), and by Goehr's considerable success in approaching an ideal of piano writing as ‘a sort of Bach crossed with Debussy—polyphonic impressionism’ in Nonomiya (1969). And, as I have already argued, his reclamation of ‘historical’ procedures and genres could be seen as the necessary complement to the stability of the serial-modal, bloc sonore harmonic method he developed after the Two Choruses (1962)—in other words, as modifications and enrichments of a technique and aesthetic essentially deriving from the Modern Masters. Yet it must be admitted that any residual questions posed by such a synthesis would seem vastly more pressing in the light of his unexpected progress since the appearance of Psalm IV.

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