mostly with resonant instruments. The score consisted mostly of written instructions for improvisation that are intended as a means of dividing roles between the instruments and the players. Between 1973 and 1975, Askell Masson worked as a musician and composer with the dance group of the Icelandic National Theatre. This gave him valuable experience in working with music integrated into larger contexts. He composed the music to a number of ballets, including Hofud- skepnurnar (The Elements), scored for flute, English horn, 24 violins and an enormous and dominating array of percussion. Syn (Vision, 1975) for female voices and percussion affords a fine and characteristic example of his musical style at this time. Both harmonically and melodically, it is similar to rather conventional atmospheric music where the essence is to be found in the sound texture and in an exciting use of metre and dynamics. Askell Masson studied in London between 1975 and 1977. His teacher in percussion was James Blades and he also studied composition with Patrick Savill, which more than likely helped him to gradually broaden his composing register. For a long time, however, Askell Masson was regarded as an impressionist with a sensitive feeling for sound, a composer who found subjects and inspiration from the world outside the field of music, but who did not wish to charge his music with social, political or philosophical content. Some of his music is based on fairy tales. The work for percussion, Vatnsdropinn (The Drop of Water) from 1977 is inspired by the reading of one of H.C. Andersen’s stories. Another entitled Blaa Ijosid (The Blue Light) for two flutes and two percussion players, written in 1978, is based on a fairy tale by the brothers Grimm. In these works Askell Masson does not attempt to portray the tale musically, but tries to create new experiences with his shimmering per- cussion playing and his elegant writing for the flute. Itys (1978) is similarly based on a mythological figure from Ancient Greece. Itys, written for Manuela Wiesler, is one of a series of works for solo instruments composed with particular artists in mind, which explains the very high technical demands of these works. A gem of this collection of

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