Why? Could it be, for example, that there is a greater respect for ideology and intellectualism in general on the Continent? Or is it a fetish with ideology, rather than a respect for intellectualism, that holds sway there? There is a great conceit in Europe over their much-trumpeted intellectual culture. But actually it's an intellectual culture that has been hijacked by a now tired and jaded cosmopolitan liberalism which has lost its cutting edge in a new world largely not predicted in the great Marxist, modernist, secular meta-narrative of the last century. We British do tend to be less ideological in our cultural make-up and tend not to fall for the glitz and glamour of revolutionary causes. In many ways, the saving grace of this country's musical modernity is a disregard for rules, and an apathy towards imposed ideological posturing. The fashionable views of the day, in politics and philosophy, have had a limited impact on the way we have shaped our musical culture. 

Nevertheless, there is a tendency in British musical criticism to see what happens in Europe as superior to here. And you'll find a lot of disparaging remarks about "British provincialism" running through the comparisons that music critics make between this island, America and the Anglosphere, and the citadels of modernism on the Continent. Our own musical accommodation with modernity, from Vaughan Williams to the present day, is caricatured as reactionary and inferior to what happens in places where a more "revolutionary" rigour has been cultivated. You'll find an unnatural and unfair comparison between — as they would see it — the insularity of the UK and US and the highest heights of professionalism and intellectual endeavour that shape the music of Germany, France and Italy. 

So there is a kind of self-loathing, a haughty arrogance in certain aspects of our critical fraternity, which is a problem. It is unrealistic and does not take a broad and objective view of the expanse of recent musical history. I find it interesting, for example, that "underground" composers in France and Italy, working at cross-purposes to the modernist orthodoxy, look for inspiration to the US, where they see a totally different pantheon of 20th-century composers. To them, the preferred narrative of modernism starts with Ives and leads on to Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Harry Partch, George Crumb, Terry Riley and especially Steve Reich and John Adams. But then, Europeans have made a habit of turning enthusiastically towards America as an attractive alternative after overthrowing their own home-grown dictatorships. Although Adams's music is still largely proscribed in Boulez's home town (and when it does manage to wriggle its way into the public sphere is subjected to the abuse of organised claques), there is a palpable forbidden excitement about it among the younger generation in France.

It is the European perspective that prefers to see tonality, for example, as to be rejected simply because it is something of the past. That seems an extreme and unrealistic view. It was understandable in a way, in that traditional musical values, like all traditional values, were rejected by the new philosophical, political and cultural elites in Europe after the Second World War. There was a feeling, in Eurocentric terms at least, that "the old culture" had come to an end, that European bourgeois culture had failed. The Christian cement to the Continent's culture had come undone, and therefore it was a perfectly respectable position for young artists to begin with a blank slate — a virgin field, if you like. No rules, no connection, no taint of the past. One sees that in politics and in philosophy, of course, but in music as well, with a deliberate
attempt to expunge any taint of tradition whether it was German symphonism or anything worryingly hierarchical or patriarchal from European history. There were concerted attempts to begin again, with apparently entirely new sounds and concepts. It was exciting in a way, but had worrying unseen implications.

Just as in the visual arts world, where many forms of traditional learning were scrapped and forgotten out of a sort of self-disgust, music entered its own iconoclastic phase. But the difference between music and some of the other arts is that music needs craftsmanship; it can't exist without it. So the craftsman in the composer — whether Boulez, Stockhausen or Berio — eventually took over. And that craftsman — the artisan as much as the artist — prevailed in the end. It is the craftsmanship and technical vision of the principal players in European modernism that prevailed for future consideration.