To try to establish a relationship between the terse linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the deceptively simple minimalist music of Steve Reich might at first seem a little ambitious, if not downright misguided. Yet a synoptic survey of the two men's work reveals a series of formal and conceptual correlations that is often quite striking. I hasten to add that my comparisons apply mostly to those of Reich's compositions where melodic and harmonic ideas are ‘phased’ and developed over the ground of a constant pulse, rather than to works such as The Desert Music where poetic texts substantially influence the form and design of Reich's music. I tend to draw more on Wittgenstein's later thought – especially the Philosophical Investigations than on his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, although Reich himself has quoted from the latter in discussing his own artistic style.

Our hunting fathers and Death in Venice stand respectively at the beginning and end of Benjamin Britten's voice-and-orchestra output. Important works (Sinfonietta, A Boy was Born) preceded op. 8, and (Phaedra, String Quartet No. 3) following op. 88, but Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and Death in Venice (1973) are a signpost and a summation. The (presumably fortuitous) symmetry of the opus numbering almost suggests that what was considered in Our Hunting Fathers was to be considered again in Death in Venice, with doubled intensity, and analysis of their respective texts reveals this to be so.

In tempo 143 we published a complete catalogue of Antal Dorati's original compositions and orchestrations up to 1982. In the year of his 80th birthday, we are pleased to issue an addendum, up-dating that catalogue with details of the music he has written since then.

The economic and political issues which affect the composition, performance, and recording of new orchestral music (or, more precisely, which prevent these activities) operate as much in Canada as in any other western country. Even if works for orchestra do appear, they are more noticeable for their rarity than for their abundance. So it is surprising even to most people in Canada to learn that one Canadian composer has written 21 works for orchestra in the past 26 years, including eight symphonies. Like his other works, these symphonies contain a wide variety of music of impressive technical and formal control and substantial expressive power and depth.

An important factor in understanding the two kinds of presentation is that – seen historically – one or other has at different times moved into the foreground; moreover, that in connexion with the development of music and as a consequence of the continually progressing ‘conquest of the pitch-domain’, a mixing of the two kinds of presentation was arrived at. Here Webern above all follows Adler, who speaks in his book Der Stil in der Musik (1911) of ‘immensely multifarious intermediate and transitional stages from homophonic to polyphonic voice-leading’, of their mixing, of a ‘to and fro rich in variety, … continual exchange of the two basic kinds, homo – and polyphony’ (p. 246). As has already been said, Webern, going beyond this, assumes that the mixing up is caused by a tendency, on the part of the two kinds of presentation, ‘mutually (to) permeate each other more and more’ (Lecture IV).

A translator is not supposed to mind his own business – only that of his author. But when the translator of Regina Busch's brilliant, wide–ranging, and stimulating essay ‘On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space’ has to struggle not only with the intractable nature of the problem of discussing subtleties of linguistic usage through the medium of language itself – and a different language at that – but with his own linguistic and musical practices; and when these last have been conditioned, on the one hand, by his early training as a physicist and, on the other, by his present activities as a composer of music in the tradition of Schoenberg and Webern; then a certain transgression of the translatorial proprieties may, perhaps, be allowed.