Every artistic medium reflects some area of human experience. These areas often overlap but never coincide, for if two media could do the same thing equally well one would be unnecessary.

When someone, like myself, after years of working in one medium, essays another for the first time, he should always, I believe, try to discover its proper principles before starting work. Otherwise he is in danger of carrying over assumptions and habits of mind which have become second nature to him into a field where, as a matter of fact, they do not and cannot apply.

The Rake's Progress occupies an unique place in Strawinsky's output: it is his only full-length work for the theatre. This may seem a surprising statement to make in view of the fact that his main successes as a composer during the last forty years have occurred in the theatres of Europe and America: yet until the completion of this opera he had never written anything that would fill an evening's bill. The longest of his ballets plays for no more than three-quarters of an hour; and neither his lyric tale, The Nightingale, his opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex, nor his melodrama, Persephone, exceeds an hour in length, excluding intervals. It is typical of the problems attendant on the production of Strawinsky's so-called ‘full-scale’ works that when the Berlin Krolloper wanted to mount Oedipus Rex at the beginning of 1928, Mavra and The Soldier's Tale had to be thrown in as make-weights.

Throughout its short, but chequered history, South Africa has been a land of extremes and contrasts. Racially, socially, geographically and climatically everything seems rather exaggerated—there is a lack of what is usually called “the golden midway.” The population is divided into Coloureds and Whites; there is more extreme wealth and extreme poverty than in most other countries; parts of South Africa are wonderfully fertile, others arid desert; and the climate varies between tropical heat and sometimes fierce cold. And so it has been with the creation of music, and the performance of the work of contemporary composers from other countries. Until about fifteen years ago, South Africans were all but unaware that they had any composers in their midst and whenever anything composed later than, say, the year 1900 was performed, audiences stayed away in large numbers. Then, suddenly, things changed. Promising South African composers began to be discovered with an almost indiscriminate rapidity and a spirit of adventure started to creep into concert programmes.

Turkey has now had four Anglo-Turkish Music Festivals in Ankara, organised by the British Council and the Turkish Ministry of Fine Arts. The first of these (1948) and the fourth (1951) I had the pleasure of conducting.

Perhaps because of her distance from England, it is frequently not realised to what extent Turkey has advanced musically during the relatively brief space of time that she has been developing on Western musical lines. There are only two Symphony Orchestras in Turkey, at Ankara and at Istanbul, and both these are composed almost entirely of Turkish musicians. The Presidential Philharmonic Orchestra at Ankara is over seventy strong, and also provides the nucleus for the Radio Orchestra and the Opera Orchestra. For the Festival, seven rehearsals were allowed for each concert, and these were of course necessary to assimilate what were almost all new works to the repertory of the Orchestra, including Vaughan Williams' Job, Richard Arnell's Piano Concerto and Alan Rawsthorne's Symphonic Studies, quite apart from new Turkish works, which I will refer to later. The quality of orchestral playing is reasonably high, by any standard; there is a very pleasant warm string tone, and the principal woodwind players are truly excellent, the brass section is quite reliable, and I was particularly struck by the playing of the first horn.

The most clear-headed musical observers change their basic critical attitude when they start discussing the cultural and artistic contributions of what political terminology conveniently styles the “small nations,” or trying to record the growth of young civilizations. They then cease to judge the material at hand sub specie aeternitatis; not wishing to offend anybody, they sacrifice objectivity and choose a benevolent attitude instead. If a work of art produced by a young community or commonwealth pleases the critical contemporary, he takes a condescending stand of the see-what-they-can-already-do order and calls the work “promising” without taking the trouble to appraise the artist's or his work's intrinsic merits; if a creative effort seems hardly worth its paper or canvas the same critic will still say the artist and his people should be encouraged by way of a few benevolent words.