Jonathan Lloyd, born in 1948, received his first lesson in composition from Emile Spira, a former pupil of Anton Webern. After this Lioyd was a junior exhibitioner at the RCM, then went on to study composition with John Lambert and Edwin Roxburgh. While at College he worked with the Twentieth Century Music Ensemble, and in due course won the Mendelssohn scholarship, thereafter attending classes given by Pousseur, and street muisician before taking up a Composer-in-Residence appointment in the Dartington theatre department in 1978–79. Several of his early works were played while he was still at the RCM, including Cantique for small orchestra. In 1981, Toward the Whitening Dawn, a 10-miniute piece for chorus and chamber orchestra written in memory of John Lennon, was performed at a BBC Concert conducted by Michael Gielen. With that work Lioyd be said to have ‘arrived’ as a compiser of unusual talent and promise.

John Lambert, who celebrated his 60th birthday in 1986, is known better as a teacher than as a composer, and despite a formidable list of past pupils, which includes the likes of Javier Alvarez, Simon Bainbridge, Gary Carpenter, Oliver Knussen, Jonathan Lloyd, Ian McQueen, and Mark-Anthony Turnage, that is a situation he and many others view as slightly unfair. His output is not especially prodigious—excluding the chamber opera, A Family Affair, to be performed at the Brighton Festival this year the numbered oeuvres run to 26 in all—yet the quality and frequently the bold originality of his music, readily acknowledged by colleagues like Ligeti and Dutilleux, surely merits wider acknowledgement than it has as yet received.

Richarid Emsley's relatively small but vital body of work has perhaps not received its just deserts, either in terms of frequency of performances or attention from the world of commissioning and publishing organizations. The primary reason for this, I believe, is an all-too-common one: his work is not as readily categorizable as that of many other young composers active in this country at present. Keith Potter implies as much in the only other article published to date on Emsley's work. Potter is much concerned with a supposed division between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in contemporary music. I believe that to be something of a red herring in this context—functioning in many cases as no more than a way of efficiently marketing, under the ‘designer label’ of postmodernism, much that lies in the uncertain territory between ‘music about music’ (which after all goes back at least to Stravinsky) and lack of imagination manifested as pastiche (which goes back much further). In any case it seems more fruitful, in the context of an introduction to Richard Emsley's music, to see each composition as part of a gradually unfolding process within his oeuvre—an oeuvre which in fact has many features in common with the processes exemplified in the individual works themselves.

Lawrence Morton's name is shamefully abstent from the new American Grove, but in a sense he was more remarkable for what he was than for what he did.

His achievements were none the less not inconsiderable. As readers of TEMPO will know, his infrequent writings had characteristic directness and style. His ‘Evening on Roof’ concerts brought new perspectives to Los Angles, as well as world premiéres of workes by Stravinsky and Boulez. At Ojai he created one of the most distinguished small festivals in America.

I was born on July 1904 in Duluth, Minnesota, and have often wondered if the chill of my native climate generated my preference for the ‘coolth’ of Classicism in the arts to the excessive warmth of Romanticism. During my freshman year in high school my family moved to Minneapolis where summer heat and humidity reinforced my dislike of climatic-musical ‘Fahrenheight’. But years later I learned to detest Midwestern winters as heartily as Czerny exercises, and not until I moved to California in 1939 did I achieve thermal composure and, with it, musical equanimity to the point where I am happy with both Mozart and Brahms.

It has been pointed out to us that the phrase ‘the candelabrum of jewish religiosity’, which appeared in George Newman's review of the Salzburg Festival production of Moses und Ann, is open to interpretation in a pejorative, and therefore anti-Semitic sense. The Editors of TEMPO take this opportunity to state that the phrase was neither understood by them in that sense, nor was it so intended by Mr. Newman; and we apologize to any of our Jewish readers to whom it may have given offence.