Three recently published works by Arnold van Wyk draw renewed attention to this most individual and accomplished South African composer. They are his 1st String Quartet (miniature score and parts), the Pastorale e Capriccio for piano solo, and an important cycle of five songs for voice and piano, Van Liefde en Verlatenheid (Of Love and Forsakenness). All three works were performed during the 1957 series of Wigmore Hall concerts devoted to South African music; and the song cycle was given at the I.S.C.M. Festival in Israel in 1954.

Britten's setting of the Chester Miracle Play is an opera for children of any age, but teenagers prevail among its performers, in the orchestra pit as well as on the stage—numerically at least. God's voice, which directs the stage events, is represented by a speaker. Noah, the principal part, is a bass, of course. His wife is a contralto; and she appears as a quarrelsome, comic figure who brings some controversy into a play that otherwise offers little opportunity for dramatic conflict. But the bulk of the cast consists of children: Noah's sons Sem, Ham and Japhet, who have important parts to play; their wives, who help to build the ark; then there is a group of girls from condemned mankind, who are Mrs. Noah's gossips; and finally, there is a big chorus of quadrupeds and birds which Noah is called upon to save.

An opera singer, except on those rare occasions when he relates the speech of others, maintains the identity of the character in which he is cast. The performer of epical and lyrical music, on the other hand, i.e., the oratorio and Lieder singer, can be a protagonist, i.e., claim his identity with the “acting subject”, only when and as long as the poet and composer demand it. One can almost recognise a good Evangelist by the way he sings the colon after the words “and he said unto them”. But apart from the singer's awareness of direct and indirect speech—a condensation, as it were, of dramatic explicitness into epical stylization—he has to come to terms with the world of inanimate objects, or rather their sensuous perception by poet and composer, that crowds the pages of concerted vocal music. One would think that a bird-call, heard or recollected by the poet, would find its exact, that is, stylistically truthful, representation in the poem; would be taken over and transplanted into the medium of sound by the composer without loss or change of meaning, and would, furthermore, find its exact equivalent when related by the acting subject. That this is at best an over-schematic view of things forms the glory of lyrical music and the despair of its interpreters.

The Personal Column of The Times frequently offers employment to “Companions”. They are required to take a more or less obscure place in decent society without feeling awkward, to be gentle, amenable to the opinions of others and to make themselves useful and pleasant: they are also expected to be able to drive a car, for they are meant to cover the ground quickly. These were the ideals which those responsible for The Musical Companion set before themselves in 1934, and with such success that in twenty years their book ran through nineteen editions. Its major revision and expansion, containing 782 pages to its predecessor's 751, appeared in November, 1957. W. R. Anderson (The ABC of Music), Julius Harrison (The Orchestra), E. J. Dent (Opera), Dyneley Hussey and Francis Toye (The Human Voice), and Eric Blom (An Essay on Performance and Listening) have revised their contributions to the original volume. The essays by the late Edwin Evans and F. Bonavia (Chamber Music and The Solo Instrument) have been brought up-to-date and where possible revised by Colin Mason, who is twice left with the unenviable task of gathering up the fragments that remain, and provides the only reference in the book to some two dozen composers, among whom are Janáček, Seiber, Searle, Hartinann, Skalkottas and Dallapiccola. These composers are mentioned only by Mr. Mason. As it is in the nature of a book to have a hero, Mr. Mason is the hero of The New Musical Companion.

Berlioz was the most romantic of composers, and The Trojans was the climax of a steady pursuit of music-drama of one sort or another, translating the struggles of the human spirit and the human race into a rich, vivid and expanding musical life. Let us glance again at this historical procession of works of double-edged impact; some of them are familiar musical experience, but many are not. At first the drama was little more than a matter of providing suggestive titles for movements, of supplying literary analogies, in the post-revolutionary style, for contrasts that Beethoven had displayed in sheer symphony to perceptive listeners. (1808: “The andante is very original and attractive, composed as it is of the most heterogeneous ideas—gentle reverie and warlike fierceness.” 1809: “… the ordinary sequence of movements … but they seem fantastically linked together.”) There might be analogies, too, for the conflation of movements of varying genres, matching the ultra-modern, Beethoven idea of a symphony of one great rhapsody of genius.

Any survey of music in the area that we are accustomed to call Latin America should begin with certain basic distinctions intended to dissipate the superficial notion of cultural homogeneity. Let us agree at the outset to regard the term “Latin America” as a loose geographical designation for those portions of the Western Hemisphere that lie outside of Canada and the United States. It is better to resort to such circumlocution than to risk the misleading assumption of a fundamental similarity in the twenty countries with which we are concerned.