Much of the debate in modern music concerns "language". If one embraces tonality, it's seen as a backward-looking gesture by some. Even someone regarded here as streetwise and cutting-edge, such as Mark-Anthony Turnage, will be regarded in certain European spheres as a reactionary composer because of his interaction with popular culture, through jazz especially. (That smacks too much of Americana, and it is de rigueur to flaunt an anti-Americanism in Europe.) But there is also a modality and pastoralism in his work that one can also detect in British music over the last century or so, and that is what the European modernist mind despises, possibly because it is seen as nationalistic, provincial and backward-looking, with an ideal based in nostalgia. Even the music of Harrison Birtwistle is regarded as "English pastoralist" in novelty-obsessed modernist Europe. He and a number of other British composers, including myself, used to be published by Universal Edition of Vienna, which has been closely associated with the growth of modernism from Webern to Boulez. They neglected their London division so much that any performances of their British names on mainland Europe that did actually take place were secured by their London representative, the legendary Bill Colleran. They didn't care about their British operation and eventually scuppered it, forcing a number of us to seek a new home at Boosey and Hawkes. We were all apparently far too beguiled by nostalgia, which, if you know Birtwistle's music, will make the mind boggle, although he has acknowledged a deep subliminal debt to Vaughan Williams.

But nostalgia is first on a list of crimes deemed out of bounds for German composers, for example, since the war, because the word "Nazi" can be used to batter anyone who departs from the script, the implications of which are left-wing and radically anti-traditional. I remember attending the famous Darmstadt Summer Festival of New Music in 1980, when any work with a major chord was jeered. There was a concerted attempt under way to undermine Wolfgang Rihm, then regarded as the main young German "reactionary" composer by the ascendant revolutionaries of the time. I have been intrigued and delighted to notice that since then he and other "conservative" German and Austrian composers, such as Detlev Glanert and H. K. Gruber, have risen to the fore and gained international respect, while the Marxist snipers have faded into oblivion, as far as the wider musical consciousness is concerned.

Charles Ives, the first non-European modernist, and Pierre Boulez 

And then there's the question of religion, which has become such a defining battleground in many areas of culture and public life. The liberal elites who control the commanding heights of culture and criticism have an instinctive anxiety about religion. They thought it should have died out by now. But they have been mugged by history, as that hasn't happened and it's unlikely to. This is yet another example of how the once powerfully cocksure analysis of the '68ers has been proved wrong. This is another reason why the prophets of Marxist-inspired modernism are in retreat right across the board. They are perplexed at how the world has gone. Their view has not prevailed, even in modern music. Everything, including our understanding of recent history, is up for grabs. As far as the classic modernist is concerned, we live in a period of chaos. They have lost the argument. The case for modernism has been undermined by the flow and permanence of tradition, and many other things that they didn't see either as important or effective in the making of the modern world. 

In the period after the war, what the new Young Turks sought out for themselves was a laboratory culture for music. Because everything was up for grabs and everything traditional — music and culture — was tainted and, in their view, finished, they had to go into a "laboratory" to make something new. They valued the resulting obscurantism, because if something was obscure it wasn't connecting with those traditional and outmoded understandings of culture that, they would say, the bourgeoisie held dear.