familiarity breeds discrimination . world of music : by Martin Cooper . as Europe and America slowly approach a cultural unity which must eventually shame the politicians into following suit , the old concept of local or national reputations in the arts is being discarded . until 1940 it was an observable fact that there were composers whose music was highly prized in some countries and entirely neglected by their neighbours , and this was explained by the difference in national characters . it is not so very long ago that Brahms met with bored incomprehension in Latin countries , that Bruckner and Mahler were regarded as exclusively Teutonic , Faur&amp;eacute; exclusively French , and Nielsen exclusively Scandinavian , while Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians marvelled at their own particular appreciation of Sibelius , Delius or Vaughan Williams . now , however , the wider musical exchanges made possible by broadcasting , recording and the international tours of major orchestras have made ignorance and prejudice inexcusable and greatly reduced the area in which national temperament seriously limits the appreciation of any music . what were formerly regarded as limitations in the sensibility or intelligence of the public begin to appear rather as flaws in the composers concerned , and the importance of those flaws is revealed in each case by the degree to which an international , as opposed to a merely local , public can be persuaded to overlook them . Brahms is now universally accepted at an estimate well below that current in Britain and Germany when he was placed beside Bach and Beethoven , but enormously higher than that which once virtually dismissed him from French and Italian programmes . Bruckner is gradually becoming known and appreciated outside the Germanic countries in exactly the same way , not as the equal ( let alone the superior , as some enthusiasts have suggested ) of Beethoven but as a great and unique figure in the history of the symphony . Mahler &apos;s case is slightly different , since he has always been neglected in his native Austria and has appealed more to individuals ( Casella , for instance , was an improbable champion ) than to national groups . the uneven value of his symphonies becomes clearer as they are more performed , but at least three of them are now repertory works here and in America , and the remaining six obtain festival or occasional performances , while the songs are universally acknowledged . Faur&amp;eacute; , once dismissed as a French trifler , is now recognised as a minor master in the field of piano and chamber music , and something greater as a song-writer ( could anyone have prophesied even 20 years ago that the greatest German lieder-singer of the day would record a Faur&amp;eacute; song-cycle as Fischer-Dieskau has done ? ) . Nielsen , like Mahler , has a strong personal following outside Scandinavia and individual works have found their place in the repertory here . the position of the great Anglo-Saxon favourites , on the other hand , is quite different owing to the extraordinary instability of the Anglo-Saxon public , which has shown itself infinitely suggestible , knowing nothing between uncritical enthusiasm and blank incomprehension . this lack of critical discrimination , which can be observed in our attitude towards performers as well as composers , is the price we pay for our provincial position on the periphery of the great western European musical tradition , our failure over two centuries to sustain any strong national musical tradition of our own . Handel , Mendelssohn and Gounod were all in their turn astonished - and , being human , delighted - by the adoration that their works received in this country . in our own day Delius was quite aware that his music was enjoying a vogue that carried no guarantee of duration and Harold Johnson has recently revealed Sibelius &apos;s pleased but uneasy astonishment at finding himself acclaimed in England and America as the greatest living composer . Vaughan Williams &apos;s position as chief of the belated nationalist revival in this country seemed to promise greater security for his music ; but , like Delius and Sibelius , he has not grown into a larger , more universal musical figure since his death . several correspondents have recently accused me of belittling , or at best damning with faint praise , the music of these three composers . but any praise must seem faint after the extravagant paeans that it has prompted in the past ; and is it belittling a composer who has been too easily proclaimed a giant to attempt a more objective estimate ? the violent opposition that these composers have certainly aroused in some quarters does not spring from an objective valuation of their music so much as from the fact that their music was used as a kind of smokescreen to hide from the public the revolutionary works of Stravinsky , Schoenberg and Bartok . now that we have begun to become familiar with these , we can also begin to discriminate in our judgments of Delius , Sibelius and Vaughan Williams - to sift their major from their minor achievements and to see them in perspective against the music of their great contemporaries . gaining from the right setting . there can be few sights in northern Europe more beautiful than the first view of the three massive towers of Bruges , giant figures dominating a rather desolate landscape , as one approaches the town across the flat coastal plain . Bruges itself , with its belfry old and brown , still preserves many signs of its mediaeval prosperity and it provides an incomparable setting for the S&amp;eacute;minaire Europ&amp;eacute;en de Musique Ancienne . some five years ago the Belgian ministry of education , a department generous in its subsidies to the arts , conceived the admirable idea of asking Stafford Cape , the musicologist and director of Pro Musica Antiqua , to organise at the College of Europe in Bruges a summer course in mediaeval and renaissance music . every year since 1957 students from all over the continent , recommended by their governments , have met in Bruges for three weeks . the complete course takes three of these sessions , so that this year was the second year of the second course . there were altogether 24 students from 14 countries , among them three students from England and one , a lutenist , from distant Finland . each day they attended lectures and made music informally together . coincidence . by a happy chance , the course coincides every second year with the Biennale Internationale de Po&amp;eacute;sie , a gathering of poets from all over the world , in the nearby seaside town of Knokke , and it has now become the custom for the students of the S&amp;eacute;minaire , under Stafford Cape &apos;s direction , to give an evening concert in the Casino . this they did last weekend , offering to a large international audience a fascinating programme of French and Italian 14th-century music and works of the Burgundian school . almost every student took part , either playing or singing , sometimes putting aside an instrument to join in an unaccompanied motet or movement from a mass . remembering that these students had been working together for only a few weeks , that many of them had little previous knowledge of early music and that some were not professional musicians , one could only marvel at the progress they had made , not only in individual performance but in a general musical understanding of a period that often seems remote and inaccessible . in Dufay &apos;s La belle se siet , for example , two sopranos , one from France , the other from England , sang easily and with obvious enjoyment in old French , as though they had been preparing the piece for months instead of weeks . much of the music performed was of great contrapuntal complexity and profound religious feeling ; that they were able to bring to it such style and insight after working together for so short a time was proof both of the students &apos; devotion and of the enlightened direction of Mr Stafford Cape . John Lade . the only real guide to play-going . about the theatre : by W A Darlington . people quite often write to ask me to choose plays for them , and it is quite natural that they should . here I am at their service , and I do my best to comply . but I sometimes wonder if they realise how difficult the task is . they are asking me to look at plays through their eyes , when my whole working life is spent examining them through my own . it is like being made to read through somebody else &apos;s spectacles . all valid criticism is informed personal opinion . that is a truism which will be questioned hardly anywhere , except in some quarters in America , where the collective opinion of the uninformed man in the street is thought to have a mystic significance . my old friend and colleague , Campbell Dixon , used to tell of a conversation he had with a New York film-critic , a lady , who heard with an air of shocked incredulity that what he offered his public was his own private and unsupported opinions . but surely , he said to her , that &apos;s what you do , is n&apos;t it ? certainly not . then what do you do ? I stand in the foyer and listen to what people are saying . well , I &apos;m not of this lady &apos;s persuasion . my opinions , such as they are , are my own , formed in accordance with my own needs and beliefs , my own experience . nobody is likely , or even encouraged , to agree with the opinions unless he has the same needs and beliefs . it follows that a good number of the people who write to me about the plays they are to see are appealing to one whose tastes and views they do not share . to take the simplest example possible , I get letters asking me to select plays suitable for a family outing or suitable for children . if I were to answer this according to my own beliefs , I should probably say , take your family ( or your children ) to anything you think will n&apos;t bore them ; but it would be the wrong kind of answer to anyone who thinks suitability all that important . common sense . it is , to me , a matter of plain common sense . at any given moment there are sure to be plays running in London to which the label for adults only might with propriety be fixed . an actual label is not necessary , because everybody knows which these plays are , or can easily find out ; and nobody in his senses would dream of taking a child or an innocent maiden aunt ( should such exist ) to one of them . outside this category there are many plays of a mild degree of unsuitability ; and to these I personally should not hesitate to take any member of my family . when I was a young schoolboy I used to sneak off to the local dust-hole week by week , and saw many plays of which my parents , if consulted , might not have approved ; and they never did me a mite of harm . later , when I myself was a parent , I exercised only the lightest of censorship on my children &apos;s play-going , and they took no harm either . how , then , can I help other people to impose a ban in which I do not believe ? anyway , once you begin to look at the problem , there is almost nothing you can take a child to . Shakespeare is impossible , of course - all those frank references to sex . and pantomime is worse . Peter Pan ? - very little sex there . true , but there are other horrors . I remember sitting behind a small boy who bounced in his chair with glee at the opening scene - the dog-nurse , the flying lesson . but he fell oddly silent when the curtain rose , and when the scene began to fill with wolves and red Indians , pirates and crocodiles he got off his seat , turned his back to the stage , and - except for occasional terrified glances over his shoulder - spent the rest of the act gazing longingly over my right shoulder at the illuminated word exit . it &apos;s just as difficult with adults . what can one do when asked to recommend a play suitable for a party of 30 people ( sex , age and tastes all unspecified ) except play safe and recommend my fair lady or the mouse-trap ? to my mind , people do much better picking their own entertainments , even at random . I know of a women &apos;s institute which , on the strength of having enjoyed Sandy Wilson &apos;s pure boy friend , went off blithely on an outing to Brighton to see his hyper-sophisticated Valmouth . 