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Nigel Wrench writes: the eyes belong to the composer Richard Barrett, on PM this evening with his new work "Mesopotamia", which has its first public performance at the this weekend.

It's the fifth in a series of political works he collectively calls "Resistance and Vision". The first was called "NO", written as the war in Iraq began, and nominated for a Radio 3 listeners' award.

Hard to listen to, certainly. At the part of the rehearsal that I heard, the London Sinfonietta, which commissioned "Mesopotamia", was battling to come to terms with the complexities his almost melody-free composition requires.

Protest music? Of a sort. The question plainly is whether political beliefs as expressed in avant-garde music can have any effect.

The composer's answer? "It's incumbent upon artists, upon composers, to try and be more explicit in relating music to everything else that is going on in the world."

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