These letters and sketches of letters which the curator of the Ives Collection at Yale University, Mr. John Kirkpatrick, has been kind enough to allow us to copy give the history of a warm and inspiring friendship with Charles Ives. It started around 1924, when Mr. Clifton J. Furness, a music teacher at the Horace Mann High School in New York City, where I was a student, introduced me to him. From what I can remember, we went to Ives's house by Gramercy Park on a dark, rainy Sunday afternoon, and stepped into a cheery, old-fashioned interior, discussing excitedly modern music all afternoon. After this, I met Ives occasionally, sometimes when he invited me to join Mrs. Ives and him in their box at the Saturday afternoon Boston Symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall, or at Katherine Ruth Heyman's loft in a building that no longer exists, on Third Avenue and 10th Street huddling under the El, or later at his house on East 74th Street opposite the Mannes School.

In the summer 1938, as I was on my way to London for the 16th ISCM festival, a cable arrived in Cairo, where I then lived. It was from the conductor Hermann Scherchen and it said: ‘My Chinese daughter born yesterday. Come to Lausanne to see her.’ So I did, and this was the first of many encounters. I remember her mother, the composer Hsiao Shu-sien, singing her to sleep with Chinese lullabies.

‘Ah, Holloway—simultaneously advancing and retreating!’ a friend once memorably hailed him. Whatever his voluble nervousness of manner, there is certainly nothing equivocal about the speed and conviction with which he composes. All the same, his mature works convey a peculiarly complex sensibility. Born in 1943, he started composing copiously during his years as a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral (1952–7). After reading English and Music at King's College, Cambridge (1961–4), he did research on Wagner and Debussy at Oxford (1965–7), returning to Cambridge as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College and, from 1974, as an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Music. More important than any of this for his development, however, was the quickening of English musical life during his adolescence. If the release in 1957 of the first recording of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces was perhaps his profoundest formative experience, this was soon to be followed by William Glock's most progressive years at the BBC and by the emergence of the brilliant new generation of Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, and Bennett; it was Goehr with whom he studied from 1960–66.

The Asian Composers' League Conference-Festival, held in Manila, the Philippines, last October, was only the third occasion at which large numbers of Asian composers had assembled to thrash out and try to solve their common problems. The League had evolved out of a new sense of regional identity, an explicitly stated desire to combat the dependence of isolated Asian composers on the distant European mainstream. The approach was one which could only have come from Asia; composers purported to ‘represent’ their country in a quasi-ambassadorial way, and the conference was opened officially by the Philippines' First Lady in person, accompanied by the President. The ‘national delegation’ status tended from the beginning to turn the conference into an uncomfortable hybrid.

This general dedication (a particular one to Hugh MacDiarmid precedes it) stands at the front of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum as gates of warning to mere ordinary minds not to enter the edifice beyond. O.C. (for short) is a chiefly contrapuntal creation for piano solo, 248 large pages of music lasting nearly 3 hours, whose length is matched by its great difficulty, complexity, and intricacy of detail. Sorabji probably began it in 1929, with partial stimulus from Egon Petri's performances of Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica. That work seems to have been a structural model for O.C., although O.C. is no imitation of the Busoni, but a transcendent creative response to it.