influence, a term which is hard to define. In the case of an influence one can generally speak of an involuntary accommodation or an intriguing similarity of some kind, but in the former case there is a deliberate creative aim, a conscious decision to employ composing methods found to hand, and some kind of arrangement of these. This means, in other words, that the composer adjusts the elements of his own style, which constitute an up-to-date idiom to a system of rules grasped as a body of knowledge. Each tendency towards neoclassicism that appears in a particular age in the work of a particular composer has its own reasons and results, in accordance with the stylistic ideals and models involved. So the various neoclassical phenomena cannot be amalgamated and considered as a single trend, even if there are years when they so predominate over innovative art as almost to appear to be a single artistic approach. But in spite of the variety of aesthetic motives, methods of employment and situations in which neoclassicism occurs, all occurrences have a common feature: all neoclassicist works or styles contain deep within themselves a strict theoretical structure, a manifold, coherent picture putting forward a model or developed in the style chosen a clear and unequivocal definition of the technicalities, expressible in technical terms. So neoclassical styles are by no means 'unsophisticated'. Quite the contrary, they are extremely thoroughly thought out and elaborately constructed fictions, and one scarcely need emphasize that they are very closely linked to the prevailing state of the various branches of musicology: history, analysis, stylistic history, and even the research into performing methods.