Steve Schwartz' review of the Lilburn symphonies impelled me to revisit them, as well as some other Lilburn pieces I haven't listened to in years. They are conservative, tonal, and very reminiscent of Sibelius. What surprised me this time was a feature of Lilburn's music I had not remembered: unlike Sibelius himself, Lilburn never seems to have written a single memorable melody. Lilburn's similarity to Sibelius is a matter of harmonic progressions and orchestral colour, producing a sort of undifferentiated Sibelian *sound*. I liked them, and like them still, probably because I love Sibelius. This leads me to think about other composers whose work has a similar derivative quality. For example, Dag Wiren (little known outside of Sweden) is another straightforward Sibelius disciple. Or, take the better known Einojuhani Rautavaara. After various eclectic experiments, he arrived at an idiom that was essentially a slightly modernized variant of late Sibelius---"Tapiola" in the Arctic---and flew with it, which he does very, very well. Or consider Joly Braga Santos, whose attractive early works often sound much like Vaughan Williams. The most striking case I know of is Thomas Canning. He taught at Eastman for many years, and his only known composition appears to be the "Fantasy on a Hymn Tune by Justin Morgan". In this, he took a haunting shaped-note melody and treated it in exactly the manner of Vaughan Williams in the Tallis Fantasia. The result is an unoriginal but utterly beautiful work, which RVW himself could not have done any better. I am not disparaging these composers, exactly. Although they do anything but break new ground, I like their work, because they are skillfull in their use of idioms established by their more distinguished models, and I love their models. I wonder if we set too much store by "originality". In this, we are influenced by the Romantic movement and by the stupendous, Promethean figure of Beethoven. But could it be that originality is over-rated? Just a question. There is a great counter-example, of sorts, in Bach: in his time (or at least in his maturity) I understand that *der Alte* was widely viewed as backward-looking rather than innovative. Eventually, history sure had the last laugh on Bach's contemporaries. But maybe "originality" should be viewed in a more complex way than we are used to doing. Jon Gallant [[log in to unmask]]