Strawinsky often surprises his admirers. When they believe themselves to have discovered his æsthetic aims or located his place in history, he suddenly escapes from their observant eyes to emerge on quite a different spot where nobody had suspected him to dwell. His most recent works, the Cantata on old English poems, the Septet, and the Shakespeare Songs, show a contrapuntal strictness of a very special kind, which he has never attempted before.

The action takes place on a lower middle class farm in the middle-west of the United States. The time is in the nineteen thirties—June—the time of Spring graduation and Spring harvest. There are ten solo parts, and in addition four couples of party guests.

Aaron Copland had the idea of composing an opera for a long time, and we had often discussed my writing the libretto for it. But as to any specific theme, or time, or locale, nothing seemed to materialise. I knew he felt, more or less, that opera was uncharted territory for him. “All those notes,” he would say, “and that awful bugaboo, dialogue.” Then one day he played me several musical sketches he kept in his note-book and with these showed James Agee's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photographs in this book related to the music he had played—photos of a sharecropper's family in the south. I knew that this was a signpost showing the direction in which he wanted to go, and an important one for me as librettist, for now, I had my point of departure for The Tender Land.

“The way a composer achieves popularity is as mysterious to me as the way a book becomes a best-seller,” says Thomas Scherman, 36-year-old founder and conductor of the Little Orchestra Society of New York. Music, especially unfamiliar music from the time of Gluck and Purcell to contemporary composers, is Scherman's absorbing interest. But it is natural for him to compare the musical and literary worlds, since in a sense he belongs to both: his father is Harry Scherman, president of the enormously successful Book-of-the-Month Club, the most successful organization of its kind in America.

The news that Halsey Stevens, an American University professor, was preparing a book on Bartók, aroused keen interest among sympathisers with the Hungarian composer, and publication-date was impatiently awaited. The author received very generous assistance from every quarter: a research grant from his university, and direct and indirect material information from a large number of people most of whose help is duly acknowledged in the preface. Why was it, then, that the book did not come up to expectations? The answer lies, partly, in Prof. Stevens's self-imposed limitations. The title says: “The Life and Music of Béla Bartók”, and Prof. Stevens seems to be careful to confine himself, almost literally, to the description of the two points his title indicates. His aims are more clearly defined in the foreword, where he says: “This book is concerned primarily with Bartók's music, approached from both the analytical and the critical point of view” (though the latter point of view is rather tentatively approached), and in a passage later on in the book: “… it has nowhere been the intention in this book to examine Bartók's work from the standpoint of its motivations, physical, psychological, or otherwise …” (p.250). I submit that this approach, though conducive of valuable information, is essentially a wrong one to adopt.

Intermezzo, Richard Strauss's autobiographical comedy of married life had not been seen in Vienna for nearly 25 years. Now it has returned to the Theater an der Wien, the Staatsoper's emergency quarters, whose intimacy, it may be said, was a positive advantage for the chamber-like character of the work. The musical demands made by the composer in his detailed preface were ideally satisfied by the subtle tonal colouring of the Philharmonic Orchestra under Rudolf Moralt. The solo ensemble did full justice to the bright, kaleidoscopic variations of light and shade created by the interplay of words and music, the constant change between speech, arioso and full throated singing.

In his Clarinet Concerto, composed in 1928, Carl Nielsen introduces his first movement with the following theme (quoted here in the C tonality of the repetition: