Leibowitz's Toccata for piano, op.62 (1964) is a particularly flagrant example of his mastery of the art of contradiction. It is based on a chapter from the book The Raw and the Cooked by his friend Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the author shows the basically identical origin of several myths which appear to be entirely dissimilar, and points out their similarities through a ‘coding’, or the recognition of repeated details. Leibowitz's Toccatais built upon two themes—by ‘themes’ I mean here a series of intervals in pre-determined order used vertically or horizontally. The first of these is based on a 12-tone row consisting of seconds and thirds exclusively. The second ‘theme’ is based on another 12-tone row containing fourths as well. When the two themes are first stated, simply, they appear as opposites. One proceeds stepwise, softly, or makes the easy, gentle move of a third; the other leaps boldly in fourths and fifths, or announces big chords, loudly (Ex. 1). The themes are reiterated backwards and come to rest in a third, common to both, at the conclusion of the initial period.

If it is true that all art reflects the social, intellectual, and human conditions of its time, today's music cannot help being profoundly affected by the changes taking place in our advanced consumer society. We have seen the end of that belief in progress which for a whole century was the mainspring of cultural development. Rationalism has proved itself incapable of ordering the world rationally, and an over-developed materialism has led only to a self-perpetuating cycle of frustration. As we become increasingly aware of how the human spirit is alienated from a world governed by materialistic and rationalistic criteria, we sense a need for re-humanization. In the energy generated by that recognition lies a hope for the future; and so long as the realities are critically discriminated, there is no danger of an illusory flight into some idyllic never-never-land.

The Park Lane Group's recent concert series ‘The British String Quartet’ provided a useful conspectus of the various ways in which British composers have tackled the quartet medium; but at the Introductory Symposium on 6 November some members of the public seemed to think the series would have benefitted by the inclusion of more works previous to the year 1960: the quartets of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Van Dieren, Rubbra, and Alan Bush's Dialectic were all mentioned in this regard. One name absent from the discussion—because it is doubtful if the participants had ever heard it, and impossible that they should be familiar with a body of unpublished music that has lain virtually undisturbed since 1939—was that of John Foulds. Yet Foulds was a prolific writer of string quartets; and at least one of them, the Quartetto Intimo of 1931–2, seems to me one of the most exciting essays in the medium ever written by a British composer. Since that work is shortly to be heard in public for the first time, it seems appropriate to direct some attention to the achievement of a composer whose music is only just beginning to emerge from the shadows.