In a sense, avant-garde music is a rear-, not an advance-guard action, for it is both a consequence of, and a reaction against, five hundred years of European ‘consciousness’. The Renaissance started with man's dualistic awareness of the distinction between the Self and the Non-Self: which in musical terms became the dualistic, and peculiarly European, phenomenon of harmony. Perhaps this burden of harmonic consciousness begins to work itself out in Wagner's Tristan. At the opening of the third act, Tristan lies in a state of near paralysis in his cobwebby castle, and hears the unaccompanied monody of the Shepherd's pipe. Alternating shiftily between God's perfect fifths and fourths and the Devil's imperfect ones, it is a ‘horizontal’ sublimation of the dualism of the notorious ‘Tristan’ chords. Harmonic resolution, after four and a half hours, is at last achieved, and Tristan sheds sensuality and guilt to enter Nirvana. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera closely related to Tristan, carries the process a stage further, for although harmonically sensuous, it dispenses with even the desire for resolution. It's a premature existential opera, for it concerns, both dramatically and musically, what happens to passion when the will is extinct.

Franz Liszt thought that Hungarian folk music and the music of Hungarian gypsy performers were one and the same thing, and it took years of angry protest and patient exposition by Bartók, Kodály and others to unravel the tangle of ideas resulting from this ‘immortal error’. In Rumania, the connection between peasant music and the music of gypsy professionals is closer than in Hungary, but even so, in style and to some extent in repertory the two musics are distinct. To most of us, Rumanian folk music means fiddle music, fast, furious and exotic. Yet in fact the fiddle is rarely found in the hands of the Rumanian peasant musician. He has his own instruments—giant alphorns, five kinds of bagpipes, and countless forms of flutes. The fiddle, like the cimbalom and the pan-pipes, belongs not to the world of the peasant amateur but to that of the public performer, the professional minstrel, the lautar.

‘The best translation is that which most tactfully reconciles the opposed claims of the English words and Bach's music’. These sane words were written some fifteen years ago by Mr. Walter Emery. Yet, in the last decade or so, we have seen the emergence of several editions of Bach's choral works which have preferred to cast them aside. For too long this perplexing but stimulating problem has remained on the shelf and it is as much to Mr. Emery as to the editors of these versions that our thanks must go for causing us to ponder awhile. Three years ago the subject reappeared in the pages of the musical press, sparked off by the release of a recording of the St. John Passion with a new English translation by Mr. Peter Pears, since which time many strong views have been expressed by experts and laymen alike.

Shakespeare was both deeply reverenced and whole-heartedly misunderstood in the Restoration period. Several of his plays were popular, but nearly all of these were more or less drastically altered to suit contemporary taste. The Tempest was perhaps the most maltreated of them all.

The nature of harping before the general use of the pedal harp makes research peculiarly frustrating. Apart from bagpiping—which is to this day so secret a skill that most virtuosi will never reveal the true details of their reed-making and playing—no instrumental technique remained so long a craft, without a written literature. As far as the baroque era is concerned, there is the additional problem that the word harp covered a number of harps with different forms, techniques and functions. This preamble is not, like that of the music-hall juggler, to make the act seem so difficult that the sympathy of the audience is assured at the start, but simply to warn you that the information I have been able to collect on the subject of harps between roughly 1600 and 1750 is drawn from somewhat disparate sources and is rather unevenly spread, both geographically and chronologically.

Until quite recently music historians thought that the Chapel Royal was founded in the fifteenth century. In 1895, Henry Davey wrote: ‘We may … date the rise of English music about 1400–20, and suppose that a Chapel Royal was first set up by Henry IV or Henry V’. Since then, much pioneering archive work has been done by Mr. John Harvey, Dr. Frank Harrison and Dr. Brian Trowell. It was Grattan Flood who, in 1924, first revealed to musical scholars what the medieval historian had long known: that the Chapel Royal in England dates back at least a further three centuries. Taking his cue from Flood, Stanley Roper delivered a paper to this Association three years later, which he called ‘Music at the English Chapels Royal c. 1135–Present Day’.

A hundred years after Meyerbeer's death his name can be read a hundred times in the pages of opera-histories for every single time that it appears on the hoardings outside an opera-house. It is, indeed, a name generally dishonoured among musicians, though more by vague generalisation than by detailed criticism. The aesthetic canons of today are as different as possible from those of the French ‘Grand Opera’, which Meyerbeer stabilised and perfected, if he did not invent; and although those canons in many ways resemble those of late seventeenth-century Italian opera—which laid quite as much emphasis on the spectacular element—the French 1830's have decidedly less historical interest for scholars. And so historians are usually content to saddle Meyerbeer with the responsibility for the most conventional passages in the early or middle works of Wagner, Verdi and Bizet without a thought of how this convention was first formed and then came to be accepted by men of such intrinsic originality. Every age numbers some Meyerbeers among its most admired composers—artists, I mean, who will be remembered less for their own works than for the influence they exercised on their successors, for having created the convention which provided the starting-point of new discoveries.