On the trip over he met the painter Marcel Duchamp, who suggested that he forget Fontainebleau and head straight for Paris. The instruction at Fontainebleau proved, in fact, routine. Copland's composition teacher, Paul Vidal, struck him as a French Rubin Goldmark: ‘He is a man with Mr Goldmark's tastes, and was therefore quite satisfied with the stuff I showed him and played for him,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘However, he is not the sort of man I shall want to study with, when I get to Paris in the winter.’ The students, furthermore, were ‘not a very talented bunch, since most of the Jews were scared away.’ But the town of Fontainebleau had its charms and Copland was able to work on his French. Moreover, he made a few friends (including future Cleveland music critic Herbert Elwell), took some conducting lessons, and, most important, met Nadia Boulanger, with whom he would study for three years in Paris.

The career of any great artist can be divided into broad creative periods denned by discernible traits. Olivier Messiaen is no exception, despte the fact that, when discussing his music, it is now part of the common currency to remark upon the constancy with which he stuck to his idiosyncratic musical language. It is true that some of the techniques and spirit which he used in the first of his works to be published, the Préludes, can still be heard in his final masterpiece Éclairs sur I'au-delà…. Indeed, Messiaen himself encouraged this perception, so that the received wisdom is of the composer as a steady accumulator of techniques for a continually expanding style. On one level, therefore, this is a reasonably accurate interpretation in retrospect of Messiaen's career. However, within this broad quality of consistency, it is possible to detect places where the composer markedly changes direction.

The image of French music from the late 18th century to the present day in its European context is less clear in most people's minds, even most French people's minds, than one could reasonably expect. Yet it has a decisive bearing on what one makes of contemporary developments. There are too few names involved, for one thing, and the lines of influence drawn do not always point in the right direction. In particular, historical ascendancy is blurred, not least because too many musicologists who ought to know better base their work on that shakiest of grounds, ‘accepted repertoire’. Manuals repeat uncritically the opinions of Grimm and Rousseau on the shortcomings of le style français without bothering to uncover the influence of Rameau and Armand-Louis Couperin on Schobert – and through him on the young Mozart. Beethoven's ‘heroic’ manner is most often thought to be the outcome of an instinctively ‘romantic temperament’ exploding Viennese classicism from inside, when in fact it was largely prompted by French composers of the revolutionary period such as Méhul and Gossec (something altogether natural in a composer born in the Rhine–Palatinate). The beginning of a new contrapuntal spirit in French music is often credited to Gounod and his discovery of Bach, to detriment of Böely both as composer and performer.

Until recently, the music of Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana was largely overlooked in Britain, despite both composers having achieved widespread recognition beyond our shores. In France they have ranked among the leading composers of their generation since at least the 1960s and have received many of the highest official accolades. In Britain, the view of French music since 1945 has often been synonymous with the music of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to the virtual exclusion of others whose work has long been honoured not only in France and elsewhere in Europe but in the wider international arena. These ‘others’ include Dutilleux and Ohana. Developing an innovative and forward-looking approach, independent from the preoccupations of their contemporaries who congregated at Darmstadt, both Dutilleux and Ohana were excluded from representation at the concerts of the Domaine musical. As a result, their music was neglected in Britain throughout the years when the programming policies of Boulez and Sir William Glock were at their most influential. Undoubtedly, Boulez is one of the most phenomenal figures in music of the last 50 or so years and the position of his erstwhile teacher Messiaen is secure as one of the giants of the 20th century. Yet, however significant their respective contribution, Boulez and Messiaen represent only one facet of French music since 1945.

Well, no. We are led by destiny, really. When I was very young, I was held to be a literary phenomenon. It was thought I was going to be an important writer. Even when I was very small, the teachers said ‘This child is already writing books’. I had an imagination, 1 knew my spelling and things like that almost from birth. And then when I was 14 years of age – in fact, on 11 November 1918, the day of the armistice of the First World War – my father died. My mother was ill, I had a younger sister – I became the head of the family. What could I do? I didn't have a trade, of course, but like every child I had learned the violin a little. Luckily at that time there were lots of cafés which had musicians who played waltzes. And it was the time of the silent cinema: there were little orchestras in the cinema. So I began to make my living like that, in Paris, and it was going alright. And one day I said to myself, it was fortunate that I had that; you should always do things seriously when you see that they stand up OK. It fed me and my family, so it was worth my while going on with it. So I continued to study the violin and I entered the Conservatoire.

The singer-songwriter Georges Brassens (1921–81) is one of the most critically lauded and commercially successful French musicians of all time. The author and composer of text and music for around 150 songs, with LP sales of over 20 million, Brassens is perhaps the most widely disseminated French ‘popular’ musician of the post-war era, particularly in French-speaking countries. Regarded by many as a cultural and musical icon, he is seen as a standard bearer for liberal French values, and – transcending standard distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ styles – as a pivotal figure in the history of French music, credited with ‘revitaliz[ing] the French post-war song’ by ‘accomplishing the synthesis of popular song and true poetry’.

• Amsterdam: Andriessen's ‘Writing toVermeer’ Maria Anna Harley

• Bremen: Detlev Glanert's ‘Joseph Suss’ Benjamin Qunnar Cohrs

• Glasgow: David Home's ‘Friend of the People’ Tom Service

• Ayr and Glasgow: James MacMillan's Second Symphony Ronald Weitzman

• Barbican: Boulez 2000 Malcolm Miller

• Warehouse: Newman, Barrett, New German Music Mark R. Taylor

I am writing to provide further information in response to inquiries about my recent article on performance issues in Gorecki's music (Tempo 211). The symposium I referred to, at which the composer was present, was titled ‘The Gorecki Phenomenon’, and, in addition to my own, included presentations by Adrian Thomas, Luke Howard, David Kopplin, Mark Swed, and Maria Anna Harley, who organized and chaired the event (and translated the commentaries of Mr Gorecki, who had much to say). This session, along with entire ‘Gorecki Autumn’ at the University of Southern California, was organized to celebrate the endowement of the Directorship of the Polish Music Reference Center by Dr Stefan and Mrs Wanda Wilk, founders of this important resource on Polish music in North America (the website can be consulted at http://www.usc.edu/dept/polishmusic/). A book collecting the research presented at this symposium, along with the lectures and interviews given by the composer during his time in Los Angeles, is forthcoming, edited by Ms Harley.