‘Dear Stravinsky, you are a great artist. Be with all your strength a great Russian artist. It is so wonderful to be of one's country, to be attached to one's soil like the humblest of peasants! And when the foreigner treads upon it, how bitter all the non-sense about internationalism seems.’

The Ricercar II, for solo tenor, in Stravinsky's Cantata contains what is perhaps the most vividly and thrillingly audible transposition in any serial work, by any composer, when at the last line of the penultimate verse (‘And rose again on the third day’) Stravinsky for the first time in the song lifts the series by a semitone, so that the singer on the final word touches for the first and only time a high F sharp (Ex.1).

Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his own works but those of his great contemporaries: “Every age,” he observes, “is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing. For instance, ‘neo-classic’ now begins to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then arranges the theft in a new ‘style’). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, ‘historically’. My use of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example, the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade before.”

The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interesting to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another. Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of them.

It is only the naïve and the cynical who imagine that the creative artist can be visited unwittingly, without an act of volition, by genius. We cannot doubt that Britten's War Requiem, hailed by many critics as his masterpiece after its first performance in Coventry Cathedral, represents not only an effort to mark worthily the official commemoration of a triumphant recovery from the ashes of war but also a conscious resolve to consummate his whole creative activity to that date in the expression of a personal abhorrence of the bestial wickedness by which man is made to take up arms against his fellow. Even the ground plan of the Requiem reflects this desire to give all, setting up within the one frame the resources of works as contrasted in style as the Sinfonia da Requiem and Cantata Academica, the Nocturne and the Missa Brevis. Yet ultimately we can compare this work only with the operas in its vast scope, as also in its development from the contemplation of a dramatic conflict. In choosing so audaciously to juxtapose the Office for the Dead with Wilfred Owen's bitter war poems, Britten dare not rely merely on the anthologist's good taste that has served him well elsewhere. Unless these two sources could be made to engage with one another, violently if need be, the result could only be disastrous. By now we are all familiar with the pattern of correspondences and analogies he was able to uncover, and the uncanny appropriateness with which such a triple link was forged as that between the Abraham of the liturgical text, of Owen's poem and of Britten's own canticle. The present article attempts to trace some of the musical links that bind the work; that it perhaps fails to do this in tones of clinical objectivity may be pardoned by readers to whom the sounds of this masterly work are still an overwhelming experience.

John Ireland, one of our most distinguished Grand Old Men of music, died on 12 June, at the age of 82. His contemporaries were Vaughan Williams, Bax, Gordon Jacob, the neglected Cyril Scott, and Havergal Brian, whose Gothic Symphony was given its première here recently, some forty years after it was written! England is not an easy country to be born into as a composer, and Ireland had a hard struggle to support himself. He went to the Royal College of Music on a scholarship at the age of 14, and kept himself alive by playing at Smoking Concerts (he was a fine pianist), teaching and coaching.