It is ironical that of all centuries of Italian musical history the one that at present seems least known and least understood in this country should be the twentieth. At the beginning of the century, it is true, the later operas of Puccini stand out as almost excessively familiar landmarks; and in the period from the Second World War onwards the works of composers such as Dallapiccola, Nono and especially Berio have become relatively well known ground at least to contemporary music enthusiasts, in the English speaking world as elsewhere. However, vast tracts of the intervening territory currently seem shrouded — where general public awareness in this country is concerned — in a thick fog of ignorance and apathetic prejudice. Here and there the fog may thin a little, to reveal isolated familiar objects such as Respighi's symphonic poems, the guitar music of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, or (at the more radical end of the ideological spectrum) the recently-much-studied futurist experiments of Luigi Russolo. Nevertheless the mists still show little inclination to lift in their entirety, to reveal to British eyes the overall geography of the whole landscape.