Robin Holloway will celebrate his 60th birthday on 19 October. Although this journal has long preferred not to have its agenda dictated by birthdays and anniversaries, it seemed high time to celebrate a composer who has long been a valued contributor to and supporter of Tempo. A number of friends and former pupils – most, as it happens, dedicatees of different variations in Holloway's 2-piano work Gilded Goldbergs after J.S.Bach, reviewed elsewhere in this issue – have been invited to contribute short articles for the occasion, whether memoirs, tributes or thoughts about particular works. Their contributions begin in this issue and continue in the October number, when Robin Holloway himself will be our Composer In Interview.

When Heinrich Ströbel commissioned Olivier Messiaen to write a new piece for the Donaueschingen Festival, he took care to specify that the piano and the ondes martenot were to be strictly forbidden. (‘Attention, Messiaen! Cette-fois-ci, pas d'onde, pas de piano!’) Such a specification is liable to be read as a measure taken to guard against any possible revival of the sound-world of Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8). In an effort to surpass the achievements of Turangalîla, however, Messiaen had moved rapidly and decisively in the intervening years. Brief periods of teaching at Darmstadt and Tanglewood led to an obvious surge of experimental works, followed by Réveil d'oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) and Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–8), his first attempts at composing primarily with bird songs. With the completion of Chronochromie (1959–60), the aesthetic stance of most of the ensuing works was firmly in place.

David Matthews was born in Walthamstow, London, in 1943. He began composing – with an attempt at a full-scale symphony – at the age of 16 but, being self-taught and formally unqualified in music, went to study classics at Nottingham University (1962–65; the university awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Music in 1997). Starting in the early 1960s he was one of the musicians (along with his composer brother Colin and the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt) who assisted Deryck Cooke in the preparation of what became Cooke's famous ‘Performing Version’ of the draft of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Between 1966 and 1969 Matthews took lessons from Anthony Milner. During this period he was also working at Aldeburgh as an assistant to Benjamin Britten (1966–70); a few years later, it was to be in an improvised piano-duet version played by David and Colin Matthews that the partly paralysed Britten first heard his own Third String Quartet (1975).

1998 was a dramatic year for Ian Wilson. Already established as one of Ireland's leading young composers, that was the year he was elected to the exclusive Irish arts affiliation Aosdána (one of fewer than 20 musicians among its 200 members); his piano trio The Seven Last Words was included in the Northern Ireland A-level music syllabus (a rare ‘distinction’ for any living composer); he moved to Belgrade to be with his partner Danijela Kulezic; and his first son, Adam, was born.

The veteran Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi died on 2 March, aged 98. Not only was he a vital figure in the development of Italian music in the 20th century, but also had a significant international impact though performances of his compositions, his work with the ISCM and as a conductor and adjudicator. He was especially renowned as a teacher: many important figures in the music of our time studied with him at some period. Here two friends pay tribute.

Aaron Copland gave many interviews during his lifetime but the present conversation only came to light recently. On 19 and 20 October 1976 Aaron Copland visited the University of Keele. The evening of the 19th was devoted to a concert including his music in the Walter Moberly Hall, after which he answered questions in front of a large audience. The next morning he spoke informally to music students. Copland has discussed some of these issues before but each time he gives them a different slant which makes his responses worth preserving.

Robin Holloway this year turns 60, the age when most composers feel able to relax a little, and graciously accept the marks of status – honorary degrees, birthday profiles, retrospective festivals and so on. But there's no sign of Holloway easing into a settled status and self-image. It has to be said this is partly because the traditional marks of status are not much on offer. The birthday commissions and tributes are thin on the ground, which he tries to be philosophical about. But you get the sense that if they were on offer, he wouldn't feel comfortable with them. Provisionality self-doubt, a permanent restlessness are the hallmarks of the man. That's true of any real composer rather than a career-composer, but it's especially true of Robin Holloway. Everything about him refutes his age and seniority, as if to acknowledge it in any way – even in unconscious things like body-language – would be a sort of betrayal. He has exactly the same slender frame he had when he arrived in Cambridge as a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in 1969, the same lean, delicately chiselled features, always registering a pained sensitivity as if the world is too bright or loud.

Songs without Voices, composed in 1991–2, is a set of four pieces for small instrumental ensemble comprising flute, cor anglais, clarinet, horn, piano, violin, viola and cello, lasting about eleven minutes. It follows on naturally from Knussen's Whitman Settings which preceded it, as three of its four movements derive their main melodic lines from purely instrumental settings of Whitman texts from the collection Leaves of Grass. Indeed the first movement's source text, Soon shall the winter's foil be here, is placed by Whitman in the collection immediately after The Voice of the Rain, the final text of Knussen's Whitman Settings.

Arnold Schoenberg, of course, did not write a piano sonata. At any rate, none of his works for piano bears this title. As I have suggested elsewhere, however, sonata form was much in his thoughts as he wrote the piano pieces of opus 23, and one of his last two pieces for solo piano, written five years later, is a sonata movement which should stand as a model of the integration of twelve-note technique and classical form. When Pierre Boulez, in 1952, famously condemned Schoenberg for using the old forms instead of inventing new ones that were derived entirely from serialism, he might have taken just a moment to consider the ways in which the old form is articulated in opus 33a and been ever so slightly more charitable, for in this sonata movement, as in certain pieces of op. 23, themes and sections are defined and distinguished from each other in ways that have meaning only in relation to the twelve-note technique: though the form is an old one, the several parts are defined by reference to possibilities offered by the new method.

(Editor's Note: in the late 1960s Tempo featured a regular column written by the late Hans Keller entitled ‘The Contemporary Problem’ – an attempt, in the author's inimitable fashion, to probe behind current musical events and put them in perspective. Partly through the nature of that perspective the feature generated lively correspondence. It is our hope to provide a similar service for the 21st century with a new, occasional series of articles by different hands. Rather than suggest that contemporary music has (or is) a problem, or for a single author to encompass it about with obiter dicta, the idea is for writers to sound off about the broader issues of performance, asthetics, comprehension and silent assumption that happen to concern them and which underlie much contemporary musical activity and composition – to ask questions which have been around as long as music has, which rarely get asked and which perhaps have no definitive answer. (They are perhaps all aspects of the largest question of all: ‘What is new music FOR?’)

The editor will gladly consider topics, proposals, or answers to these PQs from all quarters. Meanwhile the following essay by Julian Silverman, sparked off by reading the letter from the Scottish composer David Johnson in Tempo 222 (October 2002) – itself prompted by features in two previous issues – seems a good point at which to launch this occasional series. Nothing is more perennial, especially in this age of maximum availability of recorded repertoire, than the question of what do about the past, which is always with us.)

The first part of this article was published in Tempo No.194 (October 1995), pp. 2–11, and dealt with Goffredo Petrassi's first two Concertos for Orchestra as well as other works, notably the major choral compositions Coro di Morti and Noche Oscura. At the time Petrassi was 91 years of age and it was intended to complete the article within a few issues' time. Other commitments supervened, however; but the composer's death has given added urgency to the need to publish a second instalment concentrating on his concertos of the 1950s. A third and final instalment, covering Concertos 7 and 8 and some of the remarkable compositions of Petrassi's final period, is planned for 2004.

The language of every musical work can, if deemed necessary, be analysed. How each work responds to analytical prodding, however, varies considerably from work to work.

The compositional output of Michael Finnissy includes several major cycles for piano solo, which stand out by reason of their dimensions and their scope. English Country-Tunes (1977/1982–85), Verdi Transcriptions (1972–92/1988–95/2002-), Gershwin Arrangements (1975–88) and Folklore (1993–94) are all long, technically demanding and full of expressive potential. Yet they have been outdone by Finnissy's most recent piano cycle: The History of Photography in Sound (1995–2001), a phenomenal endeavour, lasting over five and a half hours and employing every conceivable means of articulating musical expression and intellectual significance. Speaking of the scope of these works, however, does not merely entail their unusual length – although the extended duration, in comparison to what is considered customary for a solo piano piece, is indeed one of their prominent features. What is more significant here is their scope in terms of the wide array of ideas, concepts and statements that make up the musical text. In that respect, Folklore (like the other pieces mentioned here) is an unrelenting statement, reflecting upon or formulating a critique of many issues that are crucial to late-20th-century human existence. This article tries to demonstrate how all these layers of significance can indeed form the subject of a piece that is supposed to be ‘abstract’ (because textless, instrumental) music.

There is a school of thought in Britain which suggests that the rigours of modernist composition resulted in sterility and uniformity. Yet in the German-speaking world, composers have explored a wide range of expressive possibilities within a modernist sensibility. They have proved that the discipline of modernism is capable of stimulating genuine individuality, and over the past 30 years, Nicolaus A. Huber has emerged as one of the most distinctively radical, yet equally recognizable personalities on the German contemporary music scene. In contrast to Lachenmann, Rihm, or Höller, Huber has not attempted anything on the largest scale, but in the spheres of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music, he has produced a substantial body of work of considerable originality and dramatic power, frequently involving theatrical elements.

The Scottish composer and pianist Ronald Stevenson, who celebrated his 75th birthday on 6 March of this year, is a man about whom it is difficult to remain objective. His Passacaglia on DSCH for piano solo, one of the longest single-movement works in the literature, has for some already gained near-legendary status. Yet Stevenson himself remains serenely, even ascetically unaware of both the adulation he induces in some and the bemusement that this in turn can cause in others – a quality that is not a little reminiscent of Busoni, the musician whom Stevenson probably admires the most, and whose music he probably knows as does no other. Stevenson himself readily acknowledges his admiration of others – it is part of his ‘human counterpoint’ of life. Percy Grainger and Hugh MacDiarmid are two further artists who act as centripetal forces in Stevenson's conversations. If there is something that was common to all three of these forbears, it was perhaps a striving to express in a single work of art a vast spectrum of human experience – one thinks of Busoni's Doktor Faust, MacDiarmid's Drunk Man or Grainger's Warriors. And yet, in his Passacaglia, Stevenson has arguably been as successful as any of them.

George Russell is 80. He is a band-leader. No, Tempo is not doing what everybody else is doing: dumbing down or getting on the bandwagon of cheap popularity. Nor are we in the least affected by the recent decisions of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and their ilk, to try do to jazz what they have been trying to do to classical music: replace musicians with trained dogs. George Russell is one of a very rare company of the most serious musician/misfits, one of the most innovative of jazz composers and theorists.

Readers of the January issue of Tempo may have come across an article of mine: the first of a series of articles by various writers on some general themes of interest to contemporary musicians. But the version you will have seen represents an early stage in the formative process of the piece. This unique snapshot of the author at work represents a first hurried response to a letter from David Johnson in the October 2002 Tempo before (somewhat provisional) emendations/extensions were made in order to create a (short) article.

What are twelve-note rows really for?

‘…I don't need to use serialism to…achieve a unity between the motifs’ says David Matthews in his interview with Mark Doran (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 223, January 2003, p.11); and most composers would say the same. After all, the motifs and themes of the first movement of Schubert's Third Symphony are so integrated that even the accompanimental cliché of repeated quaver chords turns out to be motivic and the whole of the ‘Unfinished’ is based dialectically on the tonic and dominant versions of a single three-note motif and their sublation. And in his Ninth symphony, Beethoven manages to base not only themes but key-successions, too, on a basic group of four notes and finally even creates that shattering dissonance at the start of the finale out of a simultaneous sounding of its notes. Or is that already proto-serialism?

Julian Silverman's article and letter (Tempo 223, 224) are excellent, yet hard to accept in their entirety. I would love to agree with everything he says; instead, here I am writing in to tell him where he's wrong.

In your recent review of the Zemlinsky Quartets recorded by the Artis Quartet on Nimbus (Tempo 222, pp.47–8) you stated that regrettably these discs were no longer available.