The bass moves into the middle: this is our musical revolution. Several composers after Webern, myself included, have been fascinated by harmonic structures which radiate out from either side of a central axis in reflecting intervals. Unless a strong contrary line is taken in atonal music the bass will remain at the bottom of what sounds like dissonant music. But in symmetrical mirroring structures it is forced, focal attention is forced, into the axial middle, because all relationships converge there: the sounds point to it.

Peter Maxwell Davies is not alone among contemporary composers in having changed his mind about tonality. Nor, indeed, is he the only one to have moved from an attempted serial extirpation of tonal harmony—the work he seems to be talking about in his 1959 article in The Listener is Prolation (1957–8)—to an ironic resumption of tonality in terms of quotation and parody, and thence to some kind of inner acceptance of tonality. But in Davies's case, quite unusually, the effect has been to make his music more complex as it becomes more whole, more challenging as it becomes superficially smoother: we are, of course, being warned of this in the second quotation above, which comes from a programme-note on the Second Symphony (1980), and it is not, after all, a new paradox to find music which is easy to follow but difficult to understand, though it might seem so after so much music that has been hard to follow but very easy to explain.

When János Kárpáti contributed a survey of the younger Hungarian composers to the Spring 1969 issue of TEMPO, it was natural for him to include a paragraph on György Kurtág, even though Kurtág was then 43 and a composer with more than 20 years' working experience. His history at that time was curious. Born in 1926 in Lugoj, a Romanian town acquired from Hungary in the partition following the 1914–18 war, he had moved in 1946 to Budapest, where he submitted to an extended period of study with Sándor Veress and (after Veress's defection in 1949) Ferenc Farkas. According to György Króo's model entry on Kurtág in the New Grove, he gained his composition diploma only in 1955. But throughout this period he was actively composing, and although no definitive or accurate list of these early works is available it appears that they were numerous and, within the conventions of the day, expert. Some of them were published. With the end of the Rákosi era, and in the freer atmosphere which followed the autumn rising of 1956, Kurtág was able to travel to Paris to renew his studies. There he worked with Marianne Stein as well as attending classes of Messiaen and Milhaud. He returned to Budapest in 1958 artistically resurrected, as he himself acknowledged when he labelled the string quartet he completed in 1959 his opusi. But from now on composition, though rescued from unhappy limitations, was to be a laborious and often discouraging business. At the time of Kárpáti's survey Kurtág had finished only seven works, of which the most recent had taken him more than five-and-a-half years to write. Not one of these works had been publicly played in Britain.