‘It is a blessing’—a friend once told me—‘that as a rule you musicians should be inarticulate.’ I need hardly add that my outspoken friend was himself a literary man. The answer, which of course did not then occur to me, might have been: ‘Well, what of it? if we take it that the only thing worth bothering about is the ineffable,’ though I doubt whether my friend could have agreed. He went on: ‘Look at all the nonsense your best people have uttered as soon as they generalize upon characteristics and, above all, upon the merits of their own or other nations’ music. From Rousseau, if you take him to be one of you, to Debussy's Monsieur Croche Anti-dilettante, one could make a staggering anthology, and that is leaving contemporaries in peace.’ True enough. Clearly, we must needs take the literary man at his word, but who would dream of taking a musician at his? ‘The English: that unmusical nation par excellence’, is a notion still deeply rooted in Continental minds. English music since Delius leading the world in ‘quality and quantity’ is a more recent view, propounded by no mean authority on this side of the Channel. The extremes, I suppose, compensate and cancel each other. Still, one often wishes to exclaim with Swift: ‘I have hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is for individuals.’

‘To meet is to destroy,’ wrote Crabbe of the elements in collision, and it might stand as a summary of Peter Grimes. Both the Borough and Peter are caught in the ‘force, tumult and wrath’ in which ‘the river and the ocean met’: the ordered society and the disordered elements of the individual. The Borough seems to survive the threat that Peter posed. What really survives is only the non-human, the elemental. The passing bell is tugged by human hands to signify the end of human time for each of us, but the bell-buoy sounds for ever to the movement of the tides.

The Paris Festival of Masterpieces of the 20th Century lasted throughout May, and few had time to see it all. Unlike many foreign festivals that spread themselves out over a similar period, it was crammed tight with good things throughout, with something of interest every night except Sundays from 30 April to 1 June. The third week was the climax of the festival, and in general the last two weeks were more exciting than the first two, which were apparently meant to draw the Parisian bourgeoisie, being devoted mainly to ballet by the New York City Ballet, and containing nothing in music worth a journey abroad except perhaps two performances by the Vienna Opera of Wozzeck, which is rapidly becoming as familiar as The Rite of Spring. In the last two weeks, the festival's so-called literary conferences on cultural freedom were held, and to give these the best possible chance of wide publicity, the organizers had cleverly saved up their musical trump cards until then, with what was virtually a Stravinsky-Bartók-Schoenberg week, Stravinsky himself conducting his two late symphonies and Oedipus Rex, with Cocteau as producer, designer, narrator (and of course librettist), followed in the last week by Billy Budd conducted by Britten, excerpts from Milhaud's setting of the Oresteia, and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.

There is criticism and there is reporting, or at any rate there ought to be. I do not mean the kind of thing we read in the newspapers, where writers criticize things they have heard, and report things they haven't in order to conceal the fact. Thus, as criticism and reportage are understood today, the former is the more responsible task, but it should really be the other way round whenever the facts are more important than the critic's opinions, which is not seldom. At the same time, opinions do enjoy greater popularity with both the reader and the critic himself: they are easier to get for either. The unpopular truth is that while any fool can opine and indeed perchance opine rightly, only a qualified observer can report, and only a qualified reader is interested in facts, plenty of them and nothing but them.

It is now just over a year since Colin Mason died at the age of 47. I first met him in 1964 when, as chairman of the Macnaghten Concerts Society, he asked me to compose a new work for the forthcoming season. The occasion was a concert including Roberto Gerhard's Nonet, and Colin suggested that I might like to write a piece featuring the piano accordion, an instrument much favoured by Gerhard (and used in his Nonet) but for which virtually no other chamber music repertoire existed. I subsequently wrote The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo for trumpet, piano and piano accordion, given its first performance at a Macnaghten Concert in October 1964. I was then still a student, and this was the first commission I had ever received. I have no idea how Colin lighted upon my name; but it is well known that as a critic he did not have his head in the clouds, but kept his ear firmly to the ground, the better to detect the rumblings of burgeoning compositional talent.

The publication and recording of one of the principal works of Gerhard's last years is a double event of major importance. Although Gerhard wrote so many notable works in the final decade of his life that one hesitates to call the Fourth Symphony the greatest of them, it is wholly representative of a composer who is coming to be recognized as one of the foremost of our time. If full recognition has not yet been accorded him, it may be because of the superficial but widespread assumption that the works of his last period are largely demonstrations of brilliant textural invention whose structural raison d'être can be felt only ‘intuitively’ (and thus, of course, needn't be explained). We are asked to take even the audible structure (or as some commentators seem to imply, the lack of it) on trust.

• Symphony No.2 Bill Hopkins

• Visions de l'Amen Calum MacDonald

• Piano Sonata No.1; Seven Short Pieces Calum MacDonald