As we return to the present to ask “what about today?”, I see no reason why music since 1900 should have been required to jump that train-track that leads back to all previous practices — no reason why music that does not leave the track should have been seen as inferior. I certainly want fearless exploration in art, but I want coherence as well. I noted above that a “disconnect” with even the recent musical canon is still discernible in mainland European thinking. The received wisdom about this striking and so-influential rupture, which we have traced to the late 1940s and ’50s, is that it marked among European modernists of the time a cultural revulsion with the continuities that had culminated in the Third Reich. In an article on German composer Helmut Lachenmann published in Tempo in 1998, Ian Pace was explicit about this: “The modernistic developments of the 1950s had a special potency for young Germans, distrustful of the conventions of the past, which could be seen to have been tainted by the culture from which they originated, a culture which culminated in genocide” — and I have heard this view echoed by some who were around at Adorno’s lectures. It is surely true, and understandable, that horror at the recent historical outcomes lay behind these startling disconnections — yet revulsion cannot validate, however it explains, the subsequent disorientation of artistic progression induced by that full-throated denial of traditional connection. This is not to do with the degree of radicalism but with the denial of context: how is communication with its society possible for an art that is composed in a vacuum? I believe there is no precedent for it in Western culture. To renounce the background information of our musical handbook up to, say, Schoenberg creates an artistic void — an avant-garde movement cut off from the oxygen of its own tradition.

To suggest that everything had to be done differently after 1930 has done untold damage to the ownership of new art music ever since — disproportionate damage, given that this was far from a general viewpoint: leading younger composers like Ligeti and Carter saw clearly at the time the pitfalls of this mid-20th-century trend. We can learn much about a musical society from its live music, meanwhile: today, for all the progressive trend of dissociation with the past — or perhaps because of it — we as composers now struggle to get a hearing in our own concert halls, that are effectively repertoire museums, and the connection is plain between ossified concert-programming and the severance of ownership between today’s cultural world and its new music. In bygone times, meanwhile, even while composers were widely informed by historical enrichment, the public listening environment was hungry for their new work; I believe that a concert diet, such as ours, that draws largely on music more than 70 years old, would have amazed a Londoner or Viennese in the 17th or 18th century, when new opera and instrumental music was the rage.

It is natural that any kind of artist may feel the proven achievements of that past as a formidable force; logically it even feels nonsensical sometimes to be adding to this body of work. Jacob Willer again: “The masters may loom over his (the artist’s) shoulder, but, stranded by modernity, he cannot see back over theirs.” I often feel that as composers we are less “those who can” than “those who dare”; the art we already have as our cultural heritage has nothing to prove, for its role is enshrined; by contrast our own efforts struggle to win a place in anyone’s life. Not surprising, then, that many artists still dissociate their output from the past in the search for a territory. But I still say that you cannot compose in a vacuum.