b.DIE JACOBSLEITER (Jacob's ladder), an oratorio for soli, large choruses and large orchestra. Half of this is composed already...

I would like to apply for a Guggenheim Scholarship which enables me to devote all my time, or at least most of it, to the completion of my works, in order that I may renounce any income through teaching and other distracting activities as much as possible.

I wonder whether I have to write out a special application on prescribed forms or whether this letter might suffice. In case a special application is demanded, will you please send me the forms and give the necessary information.

I am looking forward to your kind answer with great apprehension.

I am, most sincerely yours,

Arnold Schoenberg."

The Guggenheim Foundation denied the application and Schoenberg never finished either of these two monumental works. Additionally, of his last planned composition, a set of Ten Psalms, with words and music of his own, only one was completed. It is perhaps significant that all of these incomplete compositions dealt with Jewish themes...

Neither Schoenberg nor Stravinsky would have been pleased with the suggestion that there were nationalistic tendencies in their aesthetic posture, overall.

Not so the third giant innovator of European art music in the last century, the Hungarian Bela Bartok. Bartok considered his work as a scientific ethnomusicologist, that produced several monumental collections of folk music of the Magyar, Romanian, Slovakian, and other peoples, as important as his musical output. His extraordinary achievements as a composer, in no way lesser than those of his more cosmopolitan contemporaries, were, in fact, substantively based on his investigations of central European folklore, and the highly sophisticated compositional techniques of his chamber, symphonic and stage works are supreme stylizations and enhancements of the qualities he discovered in those rich traditions he was so meticulous in collecting and documenting.

In the words of his biographer, Halsey Stevens, some of his melodic lines, "are strongly dependent upon those of Hungarian folksong: a folksong by now assimilated and extracted of its essence, so that it is adaptable to a quite un-folklike use."

In 1940, Bartok, finding the situation in Hungary unbearable because of the II World War and the Nazi threat, his strongest tie to his country unraveling with

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