Yet the discomfort which, I think, has come to surround the modern equivalents of classical genre output is typified by the celebrated philosopher and writer on music Theodor Adorno, when he scornfully links such production to the fake coinage among new music: writing in the 1960s, he cites “countless concerti grossi and suites, wind serenades and other mechanical productions which would sound, once the superficial glaze of dissonance had been breached, just as old-fashioned and perhaps even more boring than anything by Raff or Draeseke”. The discrediting of composition media in the modern age portends the shifting attitude toward individuation, the concept of the uniqueness of each work — and this to me seems of a piece with the wider modernist suspicion of the comforting bounds of an inherited culture: later we will hear Adorno speak of the “sacrosanct taboos imposed by listeners’ expectations”. A similar historical rupture in painting is discussed by the artist Jacob Willer, writing in these pages in 2014 of the contemporary artist divorced from the past: “He knows he can never attain real painterly fluency by the old standards . . . The best he can do is to devise a process that works for himself, hence the diversity of modern styles.”

The sea-change in views of “the evolutionary in music” after Schoenberg and Webern is clear if we think of the terms in which the great composers were lauded, or responded to trials and triumphs: “I swear before God that your son is the greatest composer known to me,” said Haydn to Mozart’s father; “my art is winning me renown,” said Beethoven, about his arrival in Vienna. Though neither Mozart nor Beethoven exactly lacked a spark of originality, these phrases speak rather of quality, even greatness — but not of shock, ground-breaking change or even individuality. The implication is that the composer practises an art that enjoys stability and ownership, and is recognised, by that ownership, as taking his place within the ranks of that art.

The new disdain for the reassuring continuities of art in modern times is exemplified, at its extreme, by the young firebrand Pierre Boulez in 1951, asserting that Schoenberg was fatally compromised by his sense of the past. I say “new” because as recently as in Webern’s lectures in 1935, we heard the past still enshrined as our guiding star; the late 1940s, however, may be the point at which critical opinions crystalised a more radical conception of what a “new music” means.

The thrust of Boulez’s famous polemic, Schoenberg Is Dead, was that Schoenberg’s ability to realise his own pure, new world was fatally undermined by reliance on classical forms — yes, that continuity exalted by Webern as “tradition”; this means not just the outer shell of Schoenberg’s variations, Baroque dances and sonatas of that precious European inheritance but their entire inner periodic framework. “Schoenberg employed the series [his ‘12-note row’] . . . to ensure the semantic unity of the work, but he organised the elements thus obtained by an existing rhetoric, not a serial one.” This is worth highlighting for its context: Webern had said almost exactly this, but for him it was a reassurance; almost overnight, though, the past had gone from enabling provenance to hampering irrelevance.

For Adorno’s ideology, “the new music” is thus an experience aspiring to purification of its own past, while even for Webern it was an assertion of continuity. Adorno is hard on Richard Strauss for the latter’s backsliding from the cause: “Even Strauss, whose boldest strokes were genuine caprioles which unquestionably dealt the system a severe blow, finished by reinforcing it all the more powerfully.” If the role of art is “to deal blows to the system”, things have certainly changed, not to say become politicised. It seems, then, that the new music of the age dabbles at its peril in congress with modes from its past; for that past, with its listening habits, is now a fatal limitation.