Nor is comfortable imitation of fashion a refuge: Adorno is not persuaded by those who are “content to produce further examples of various types of compositions established by composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky and Hindemith, without recognising that these types do not define a space inside of which one can move with pre-established assurance, and that what matters is exclusively the production of new types, or rather new characters”. He elaborates: “The avant-garde therefore calls for a music which takes the composer by surprise, much as a chemist can be surprised by the new substance in his test-tube.”

Such imagery, with its talk of chemists and test-tubes, is in fact strangely prophetic of confused tendencies within modernism (even today) to appropriate quasi-scientific language and quantities. While the radical new outlook so startlingly drawn by Adorno here cannot be said to have prevailed, 50 or 60 years on, among English-speaking composers, its legacy is surely stronger among groupings in mainland European centres. During recent Soundings Festivals promoted by the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, I’ve conducted extensive public conversations with some younger Austrian composers, and probed their sense of connection to even the recent historical past. I continue to be struck by the lack of that sense — so important to Schoenberg as well as Webern — that you’re connected, taking forward something from your past. By contrast, some of the composers I interview have explicitly pursued composition as a rebellion against an academic establishment, striking out from what they found to be fossilised adoration of the Viennese canon and rigid conservatoire attitudes; one reported feeling stifled specifically by the regimentation of European piano pedagogy, and had turned to composition for its supposed lack of cultural baggage. Two Austrian composers who disclosed to me mainstream concerns with phrasing and hierarchies admitted to being self-conscious about their “traditional approach”, though their music was to my ears quite radical; none of them expressed excitement with the historical canon, the way that I might revel in Ravel or bask in Beethoven — a backdrop that cannot be excised from my composer-thinking. Among my Austrian colleagues there was a tendency to relegate historical learning to an academic outlook, leaving it thus estranged from their practice as composers. We shall return to the reasons for this different outlook; it suggests that, in our modern culture, different constructions of the idea of “past”, the traditional (organic) one and the iconoclastic (disconnected) one, can even exist, in parallel, to inform different compositional environments.

That brings us to the idea that the single journey of musical history has, itself, reached an end to its linear progress: if we may switch metaphors from land to water, a river has become a lake. “The new music” may be a listening purified of its own past, but the reality is that other musics will continue in parallel — those that will be historically informed just as before, in defiance of the orthodoxy of Boulez and Adorno.

In his landmark study of music in the modern age, Music, The Arts and Ideas, Leonard B. Meyer set out in 1966 the bold thesis that the restless exploratory journey of Western musical history could cease and compositional practice still function. Evoking human spheres in which, he claimed, stasis has facilitated continuing activity, Meyer posited a new order of permissive diversity, in which we may actually have stopped “laying track” altogether; maybe now we just choose our place to be. He wrote: “The old has not, as a rule, been displaced by the new. Earlier movements have persisted side by side with later ones, producing a profusion of alternative styles and schools — each with its own attendant aesthetic and history.” Later in the book he noted: “All these ways of making music are with us, and will probably continue to be with us for many years.”