For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

It is more than half a century since Schoenberg first introduced rhythmically organized speech, with relative—not absolute!—pitch outlines defined, into his music; significantly enough, the abandonment of normal song first happened in his earlier atonal works, such as Pierrot lunaire and Die Glückliche Hand (which I call ‘The Knack’ in English). That this disintegration of pitch followed hard on the heels of the disintegration of tonality is a simple historical fact which criticism has hitherto altogether neglected. We have been so preoccupied with the loss of key on the one hand and the speaking voice's loss of pitch on the other, that we have never stopped to consider that—and, most important, why—the two belong together.

• Richard Meale's Homage to Garcia Lorca (Stephen Walsh)

• Shostakovich's Ninth String Quartet (G. W. Hopkins)

• Britten's Voices for Today (Hugo Cole)

• Schoenberg's Jacob's Ladder (Anthony Payne)