Contents (click here for detailed listing, including examples discussed)

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Editor’s Preface

Part One

• Staking Out the Territory
  
• Viewpoint (1954)
• The Composer Speaks’ (1970)
• taking out the Territory (1973)
• Teachers and Pupils (1980)
  
  
• Finding Your Own Voice
• Thoughts on a Modern Quartet (George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3)
• May I Quote You?
  
  
• Thinking about Composers
• Beethoven
• Frank Bridge and ‘The Land Without Music’
• Edward Elgar: A Personal Reflection
• A Photograph of Brahms
  
  
• Memories and Tributes
• Stravinsky
• Dallapiccola
• Schoenberg 25 Years On
• Hans Keller 1919-85
• Derrick Puffett 1946-96

Rough Circles

• Illustrations by William Scott (see separate list)

Part Two

• Concert Hall Essays (1973-78)
• Life, Mortality, Music and Time (Birtwistle’s Triumph of Time)
• Falling into the Public Domain (Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger, Wesendonk Lieder and Siegfried Idyll)
• The Honest Listener (Stockhausen’s Gruppen)
• A Philosophical Opera (Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron)
• An Imaginary Andalusia (Ibéria from Debussy’s Images)
• Holding a Perfect Balance (Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto)
• The Roots of Art in Life (Brahms’s First Symphony)
• Rendering the Peasant Soul (Stravinsky’s Les noces)
• Forces from Outside the West (Holst’s The Planets)
• After a Lost War, Comedies (Schoenberg’s Serenade)
• Entering the Last Style (Debussy’s Jeux)
• Running Faster than the Scientist (Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter)
• A Furthest Point of Exploration (Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand)
  
  
• Chamber Music Essays (1991-93)
• Bariolage à la Berg (Berg’s String Quartet, Op. 3
• A Very Beautiful Cat (Ravel’s String Quartet in F)
• An Inordinate Amount of Work (Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor)
• The Early Days of the Waltz (Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner)
• A Last Great Monument (Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht)
• 255 Combinations (Mendelssohn’s Octet)
• The World of the Scarlet Tanager (Dvořák’s String Quartet in F, Op. 96)
  
  
• List of Other Programme Essays

Part Three

• Reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (1999-2006, except 1 (1977))
• Arnold Schoenberg
• Leoš Janáček
• Gustav Mahler
• William Walton
• Hector Berlioz
• Edgard Varèse
• Gustav Mahler to Alma
• Michael Tippett
• Igor Stravinsky
  
  
  
• Appendix
  
  
• Index

see also:

• introduction
• publication details and contents
• excerpts from the book