The chief impulse comes from the emotions. Their fulfilment and their frustration are equally conducive to expression: what one has, one utters; what one lacks, one laments the lack of, or invents.

If one spends months on end in one's formative years listening to The Turn of the Screw and Peter Grimes, mixed up with the Five Orchestral Pieces and Jeux, The Dream of Gerontius and the dances from The Midsummer Marriage, the Four Last Songs, Agon and Le Marteau sans Maitre, curious transformations will take place that won't allow one to lose any of the elements, whatever the vicissitudes of later taste. One gradually recognizes that one is what one assimilates, whether one likes it or not, and so a revulsion from love to hate won't make any difference to the constituents; and that since there is no choice—these accidental conjunctions are here to stay—one had better knuckle down and cultivate one's native soil, with a due sense of one's independence upon it for the sustenance of life.

To an extent unusual among present-day composers, Robin Holloway is occupied with words—as a lecturer and teacher at Cambridge, as the author of many articles and reviews, as the compiler of his own libretti, and as one who sets the words of others to music. Of his forty-one works with opus number, eighteen are sets of songs; another five are unaccompanied choral works. He has also written an opera and three cantatas.

It would be a mistake to suggest that Robin Holloway's works for chamber ensemble form a coherent group. One cannot even unhesitatingly apply the term ‘chamber music’ to all the works under consideration here: Fantasy-Pieces, Evening with Angels and the Concertino No.3 are not significantly different in scope from the orchestral pieces to which each is most closely related—Scenes from Schumann, Domination of Black and the two earlier Concertinos respectively; that is to say, one can just as easily see them as orchestral pieces manquées. What can be stated with certainty is that among Holloway's chamber ensemble pieces are to be found some of his favourite forms and some of his most characteristic ideas, both musical and extra-musical. Garden Music and the Serenade in C, for instance, are divertimenti like the three works which bear that name: essentially, relaxed pieces for civilized enjoyment. Evening with Angels has affinities both with the tone-poem and the song-cycle—the latter such a beloved form of Holloway's that of his 41 opus numbers to date, no less than eighteen are song-cycles of various kinds. The Rivers of Hell is also a kind of tone-poem, as well as being Holloway's most ambitious exercise so far in purely chamber sonorities.

These two large-scale works, both uncommissioned and still to be performed, were completed respectively in 1973 and 1976. It isn't surprising to find even that short three-year space to be deceptive: early sketches for Clarissa were going on at the same time as the composition of Cantata on the Death of God; and not only do they seem to have arisen from very similar preoccupations but they should provide, between them and individually, a telling illustration of some of Holloway's most basic intuitions and convictions.