The Times, 2 April 1959

From our Special Correspondent

When a composer completes a new work, he thereafter hopes two things of it: first, that it may communicate to other people the impulse that obliged him to write the music; and second, that he may be led, by hearing it in public performance, to appraise its qualities self-critically, and so understand more clearly how his art must go on developing. He wants to give pleasure, and he wants to learn.

These at least are the hopes of Lennox Berkeley, one of our most active composers, whose second symphony and second piano concerto recently came to first performance. He says: ‘I don't know if I'm old fashioned in wanting my works to give pleasure. So often with new music one feels that the composer isn't interested in communicating to anybody but a small circle of colleagues. So many of these composers are obsessed with technique, and the sound of the music is of quite small importance. The public is bound to fight shy of this highly intellectualised music. I'm not at all opposed to serial music; I've benefited from studying it, and I have sometimes found myself writing serial themes – though I don't elaborate them according to strict serial principles, because I'm quite definitely a tonal composer. And there are some exceptions to the gospel of intellectualisation – I enjoyed listening to the record of Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître very much, because there the timbres of the music were attractive in themselves’.