Significantly, two of the best known 20th-century American composers, both Brooklyn-born, did not meet each other on US soil. Aaron Copland and Roger Sesssions first met in Paris in 1924 at Nadia Boulanger's apartment. In 1926 a long correspondence began that lasted until the 1970s, but which was concentrated in the decade 1926-1936: of the 107 extant letters between them, fully ninety fall into this decade. Clearly, in 1936, a falling out occurred between the two composers; at the end of this article, I shall hazard a hypothesis as to why.

We have no sacred monsters anymore, no larger-than-life Stravinskys whose every gesture fires the collective imagination. Even our performing artists are now sold as regular guys, while American saints are fundamentalist hacks snatching expensive haloes from each other.

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote of Benjamin Lees in Tempo: ‘At a time when so many otherwise valiant composers are star-crossed and complain of malign neglect, Benjamin Lees rises “in excelsis” in the musical firmament’. And so he has continued since, with many commissions and numerous major works to his credit, matched by frequent performances in the United States. It is a time that has seen the creation of his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, a set of Variations for Piano and Orchestra, a Concerto for Brass Choir and Orchestra, a Double Concerto for Piano, Cello and Orchestra, at least four other orchestral compositions of substantial scale, and the Third and Fourth String Quartets. All of these have contributed to his continuing high profile in the American musical scene. When one surveys Lees's entire corpus of music over the last four decades, one sees an impressive range of works, achievements and awards. Such pieces as the Violin Concerto (1958), Third Symphony (1969) and Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1965), all commercially recorded, stand out as landmarks not only of his own music but of postwar American music generally. His style has continued to evolve in recent years and whilst his hallmark is still his adherence to form and structure, he has become more concerned with orchestral sonority and, without becoming explicitly programmatic, practises his art within an ever-widening sound spectrum and colouristic palette. He has always possessed a strongly individual personality, and the ‘Lees Sound’ is unquestionably unique, even through his exposition and development of musical ideas-and the technique of continual evolution which he favours at present-derive, at source, from his most important early musical teacher: George Antheil.

Virgil Thomson's music is foolishness to some, a stumbling block to others, but those of us who love it love it with all our hearts, through thick and thin (which often as not means through bad and unknowing performances). Those who don't love it, don't see that there's anything there at all. They just don't get it. The music can also seem cryptic to players, since although it has few notes, it is nonetheless not at all easy to play. On any number of occasions I have had people tell me that the music seems to them to be just harmony exercises. I have never been able to explain it to them. If they don't see the great beauty of The Mother of Us All or Mostly About Love or the Cello Concerto, nothing I can say can make them see it. I simply sadly resign myself to the fact that between them and me is a great, unbridgeable gulf.

Modernism and postmodernism are characterized by their heightened consciousness of the influence of the past on the present. Modernist arrangements of older music, such as those by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Stravinsky, frequently display an unconscious tension between composer and arranger in the often veiled interpretation of the past in the light of the present. Postmodern arrangements, on the other hand, are often more overt in their allusiveness to the original: hence it is possible clearly to discern, within arrangements by such composers as Henze and Berio, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle, an explicitly individual balance of past and present, an attitude which preserves the spirit of the original by means of a consciously creative interpretation.

In our review (Tempo 174) of Contemporary Music Review 4, Music and the Cognitive Sciences (Harwood Academic Publishers), the price of this volume was stated to be £103.15. We are informed by the publishers that the price is in fact £27, with a special reduction to £16 for members of the S. P. N. M.