The State of the Nation

Extract

This quotation, taken from a newspaper report of a London Borough Council meeting, represents a significant part of the background against which our current musical renascence must be judged. Last year the Arts Enquiry produced a Report on Musical Life in England, and in recent months there has appeared another of the annual British Council Reports, The Year's Work in Music, as well as the Fourth Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The first-named is notable for its facts and figures—the cost of orchestras, the size of audiences, etc.—and should prove a useful source of information, a serviceable corrective to loose thinking, for some time to come. The second is deliberately more selective, pinpointing in a series of essays various aspects of the current scene—“Musical Life outside London,” “Musical Research,” etc.—and concluding with a “Selected Bibliography of Published Music and Musical Literature” and a “Selected List of Recordings of British Music” for the year under review.