This situation was for Meyer a product of expanding cultural availability, and it heralded a shift from historic to intrinsic value: “For a twentieth-century audience the appeal [of remote times and cultures] is irrelevant: the past is no longer distant, and the distant is no longer mysterious. Today, when the same person may delight in modern jazz and Renaissance polyphony, read Haiku poetry and Brecht, collect action painting and pre-Columbian art, the attraction of past or foreign art lies neither in romance of the remote nor the charm of the unusual, but in significance of form and perfection of result.” He went on: “As foreseen here, the future, like the present, will hold a plethora of styles and a plurality of audiences in each of the arts. There will be no convergence, no stylistic consensus. Nor will there be a single unified audience. I find nothing shocking or deplorable in this.”

None of us could deny the prescience of his prediction: we are all cultural travellers now, and — how right Meyer was — the remote and the unusual have certainly suffered a corresponding loss of their cachet, along with our once-isolated global localities. Equally accurate is Meyer’s prophecy of audiences fragmenting into minority supporters of different musics, which has clearly come about in globalised culture.

But what is the implication of this new order (if it pertains) for any sense of artistic lineage? Jacob Willer, writing about painting, echoes what I said above about the modern priority of individuated expression; tellingly he points out the need for experimentation to have a historical backdrop. “Of course, some painters have enjoyed devising their own styles. They celebrate their experimentation as if it were the liberation from tradition, because they want an individualistic art. But experimentation cannot be liberating when there is no choice but to experiment. The modern painter is an individualist in art whether he likes it or not.”

So there we have it: composition as tradition; composition as escape; composition as protest; composition as whatever we need it to be. I believe the shift in attitudes to art mirrors its social ownership: Beethoven’s reported comment on settling in Vienna, “my art is winning me renown”, embodies a wide ownership of his practice; by contrast Adorno noted, in the same city 100 years later, the loss of listenership around what composers wanted to do — the schism opening not just with listeners but with deeper historical continuities previously taken for granted. This, at first a de facto splinter (to the dismay of Schoenberg and the others), was later to be fashioned, as we have seen, into a spear of ideology.

I say it was later that the schism became a tenet of modernism in Western culture, but while placing the rupture with the past so precisely between Webern (1935) and Adorno (1948) I should not neglect the roots of modernism in 19th-century Europe. The musical historian Carl Dahlhaus sees this splintering that is our topic today as a facet of Romanticism: in his great discussion “Nationalism and Music”, Dahlhaus notes that “the preeminent aesthetic principle of the 19th century was the dogma of originality, an ideal that gave rise to a constant search for novelty. The seal of aesthetic authenticity was placed only on what was unfamiliar: imitation was no longer, as in the past, applauded as a pious honouring of tradition, of what was old and true.” This offers a pre-echo of my modern schism, in familiar phraseology, but locates it a century earlier; maybe it is enough to note that in many ways modern musical culture, defined by the individuation of expression, began with Beethoven.