Editorial.

Dear Readers,

Alois Haba certainly deserves the amount of space we have devoted to him in this issue. He was a highly distinctive experimental composer and music theorist and a no less important teacher. One of the few 20th-century Czech composers to have entered "major" musical history as a matter of course, Haba is a respected figure especially in the German-speaking world and was so even in the period before the Second World War. His name is traditionally linked primarily with microtonal music. This was a field in which together with a number of other composers Haba was an undoubted pioneer, but his importance cannot be reduced to this activity alone. In this issue we have also included a portrait of the contemporary composer Martin Smolka, who is likewise intensely interested in microtones and uses them in his work. It would however, be rather too simple to present Smolka as some--albeit distant--successor to Haba. Smolka is a "child" of the post-war avant garde, for which work with microtones was already quite an ordinary phenomenon and which came to them first and foremost through interest in the timbre element of music. If there is any respect in which Smolka is a successor of Haba's, it is probably simply that his work is gaining ever greater respect abroad. We are pleased that we can contribute to this with our magazine.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Wishing you a beautiful autumn

PETR BAKLA

EDITOR