Everyone Knows that several of Gustav Holst's early works are concerned with subject-matter derived from Indian mythology. The most significant, though by no means the only, examples are the operas Sita and Savitri, the cantata The Cloud Messenger, and the various settings of Hymns from the Rig Veda. His knowledge and use of that subject-matter, however, has received little critical appraisal. Conventional formulations such as that in John Vinton's Dictionary of 20th Century Music (‘his studies of Sanskrit … introduced him to Eastern thought’), themselves derived from Imogen Holst's biography of her father, have been allowed to stand unscrutinized. There has, in particular, been little or no discussion of the relationship between Holst's sources, compositional style, and creative achievement in these works – which constitute, after all, his first really personal contribution to European music. Yet these are vitally important considerations if the music of Holst's ‘Indian’ period is to be rescued from the picturesque. Just as important as the literary and philosophical aspects is the cultural context; a discussion of that will help to explain why Holst should have been looking towards India in the first place.

In a Moment of Reflection Ives asked himself, ‘Are my ears on wrong?’ Like so many composers he had to contend with periods of self-doubt, and during the first two decades of this century, when his mature works were written, he was presented with very few opportunities to hear them played in public. Yet he continued to jot down a muddled host of experimental ideas; his imagination fuelled by personal experience. From childhood in Danbury Connecticut Ives had possessed a phenomenal memory: for the kinds of literature that he read, the people that he met and the music-making that he heard. All these impressions were later collated and presented in his Memos. Dictated in the 1920's and 1930's, they make fascinating reading, both in terms of their vivid accounts of local bandcalls, revivalist singsongs, barn dancing, blacked-up minstrelsy, and ad hoc performance practice together with the composer's opinions about American musical life as he knew it. However, none of this was mere objective note-taking: Ives often expresses himself in the vernacular and doggerel of his boyhood.

Erik Bergman has long been regarded in his native Finland as one of his country's senior composers, but his music has been slow to make its way abroad. Some of the obstacles are understandable: choral music, for instance, constitutes a large slice of Bergman's output, and the fact that many of his texts are in Finnish or Swedish has obviously (if erroneously) been off-putting for foreign choirs. But the real problem is one of perception. Bergman's music has a particular kind of originality and character which, while in one sense typically Scandinavian, simply does not conform to the expectation that has been conditioned by the more exportable aspects of 19th-century nationalism.

When Alexander Tcherepnin Died in 1977, he left a rich legacy of symphonic composition written over a major portion of this century. Of these works, the most important are the four symphonies and the Divertimento for orchestra. They are worthy companions of the symphonies of Prokofiev and Shostakovitch. The changes of style found in these five pieces correspond to similar changes found in other major composers of the period.