Dealing with the fundamental issues that face composers today, this collection of essays begins with a Letter to Boulez in which Alexander Goehr assesses his own progress away from the avant-garde of the 1950s. Goehr's account of the Manchester School of which he, Maxwell Davies and Birtwhistle were the protagonists, reveals what it was like to grow up musically in a world where modernism was considered almost a vice, and Messiaen's composition classes are described with loving detail. But Schoenberg and Stravinsky were, and are, at the heart of Goehr's musical concerns.