(In Tempo 216 Pierre Boulez, interviewed by Simon Mawhinney, talked about his own recent music. The present interview, conducted in French, in Paris in June 2000 was published under the title ‘…un Compositeur qui m'oblige a avancer…’; it appears here in English for the first time, translated by Sue Rose.)

This article arose from the author's review of Daniel Albright's recent study Untwisting the Serpent – Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press). The review, now published in the Spring 2001 Issue of the Kurt Weill Newsletter (vol 19, no. 1), concentrates on Schoenberg and Weill, while the article explores other aspects of Modernism considered by Albright. Tempo's own formal review of Untwisting the Serpent is contributed by Peter Quinn on p. 00 – Ed.).

It surely must take a lot of courage to resign from one of the most prestigious (and best remunerated) positions in the musical world to pursue a career as an independent, free-lance composer. But this is precisely what the Australian Brett Dean did a year ago, when he left the Berlin Philharmonic's viola section after 15 years and went back to his native Queensland. And for all that, composing hadn't even been a part of Dean's training at the Conservatory in Brisbane, or had it?

Britten's first masterpiece, A Boy was Born, paid tribute to the English choral tradition which had played so prominent a part in our musical history, albeit with a technical virtuosity very different from the manners, if not the modes, of conventional British pastoralism. Although A Boy was Born is not strictly speaking a religious work, it is about the burgeoning of life in innocence, and Britten's ‘cleverness’ involved a knack of discovering musical images that ‘enact’ aurally and even physically the visual images of the poems: a marvellous instance of which is the simultaneously burning and freezing major and minor seconds that aurally ‘realize’ the Bleak Mid-Winter of Christina Rosetti's poem.

The first part of this article, a consideration of a number of younger ‘post-spectralist’ French composers as llustrated by some of their recorded works (the recordings are detailed in an annexe to this part) appeared in Tempo 212. That part concluded with a discussion of Pascal Dusapin and his expressive programme ‘to draw a wracked lyricism from his material through sensuously tangible strategies of constraint. As we shall soon see, younger composers have been quick to take this up to their advantage …’)

• Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts Peter Quinn

• Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet Anthony Gritten

• London, QEH: Carter's ‘What Next?’ Malcolm Miller

• South Bank: ‘Voices: Henze at 75’ Guy Rickards

• Royal Festival Hall: Max's ‘Antarctic’ Symphony Paul Conway

• London, Coliseum: David Sawer's ‘From Morning to Midnight’ Julian Silverman

• London: St.Cyprian's: Geoffrey Alvarez and Ho Wai-On Mark R. Taylor

• St. John's Smith Square: Tavener's ‘Epistle of Love’ Malcolm Miller

• London, Barbican: Donatoni's ‘Prom’ Martin Anderson

• London, Barbican: Norgård's ‘Terrains Vagues’ Robert Stein

• A Postcard from Vienna: Hans Keller Symposium Mark Doran

• Tavener and Kancheli Mark Cromar

• Skalkottas Chamber Music Guy Rickards

• Tracts: the unapologetic Ian Pace Geoff Hannan

• Judith Weir's Night at the Chinese Opera Guy Rickards

• Holliger and other Swiss composers Peter Palmer