A fascinating playing-out of this schism in artistic thought was aired when a collection of articles on the composer Alexander Goehr appeared in 1980. His Cambridge colleague Robin Holloway, in his contribution, "Towards A Critique", found in Goehr a constructivist approach to music and analysis, where every work has some embedded element in it, to be unlocked: something has to be "going on" — a classic Schoenbergian inheritance, of which I believe Goehr would be conscious and proud. Echoing Meyer above, however, Holloway countered: "The passage ‘speaks' because the ear is excited or pleased. The combination might have been brought about by a note-row, a magic square, a throw of the dice, or the cat running up the keyboard. But its cause is not its reason; the intelligibility lies in the sound itself." In the light of such historical debates as these, the idea of composition as embodiment of (or even vehicle for) explicable and conscious processes could, if anything, be argued to have passed its sell-by date.

Nonetheless, stress upon there being "something going on" — what Holloway called in his article "the assumption of an alleged deep structure in a work" — is itself regularly embedded within the language surrounding the research dimension of composition: big value judgments lurk among the terminologies around what endeavour merits support. Is a work intrinsically more valuable for, say, "advancing the development of new performance techniques" than for exploring some approach to duration or texture? Should a work "exploring the borders between un-pitched string sounds with live electronics" enjoy precedence over another that uses traditional instrumental means to widen the composer's harmonic world? Exploratory techniques, links to technology — such progressive terminologies now claim the highest ground so confidently that on a clear day you can make out a flag.

When my 2006 proposal for the work that became Agricolas for clarinet and orchestra was sent back for clarification, there was no concern about its substance, dissemination or reception, but only about "what exactly would I be finding out" in the process. The reviews that later greeted the 2012 CD recording of Agricolas or its concert performances have not shown any explicit interest in those discoveries (though at various levels they do exist), nor have they lamented any perceived lack of them. Here then is why I find the confusion between composition and research so bonkers: even if research elements feed into a work of art, its artistic merit may exist largely independently of them. In Robin Holloway's succinct phrase above: "Its cause is not its reason; the intelligibility lies in the sound itself."

My resubmitted proposal back in 2007 did explicate a research element in the work — but one that leads me to a two-headed paradox. First, what I discovered, while new and pregnant to me, was not claiming new ground in the narrow field with which I was collaborating; what was new was perhaps its particular artistic application, but only that. Our misty-eyed fervour for such research trysts overlooks the fact that one party is often re-orientated or even inspired by what, to the other half, is just part of the landscape. It may not be "hard research", even though the synergy is special.

Second, what I discovered while toying under my research fig-leaf, although it led to my "adding to the sum of knowledge" and such pieties, in fact formed a limited part of my resulting work (in which it informs four interlude sections); the bulk of the work is concerned with largely traditional concerns of harmonic structure and orchestral deployment. As I mentioned, in critical reception no one much cared about the specified research, or whether it had any great artistic role; meanwhile, remember, the frumpy, mainstream concerns that were central to my work had not been felt sufficiently research-specific, despite their central importance to the music. They were not "research".