I am unapologetic in the pleasure I take in the British music of the last century (and still counting), and in my admiration for a great number of modern English composers who, when I was young, were generally viewed with a certain condescension by continental critics and music-enthusiasts. Times have changed, of course, and the il faut se moderniser orthodoxies of those days have somewhat receded before the forces of “musical pluralism,” the growing acceptance of the notion of “alternative modernities,” and (let’s be honest) the ever greater public indifference to classical music. British music is no longer the love that dare not speak its name. And, after all, though the great British composers of the twentieth century were—like their Scandinavian and American counterparts—more reluctant to take leave of classical and Romantic tonality than were the more avant-garde musical schools of Europe, they were hardly the hidebound and derivative traditionalists they were so often represented as being by their detractors. It was simply a matter of cultural temperament that dictated that British composers should prefer to advance by also looking backward, and that they should refuse to disdain Britain’s native melodic genius.
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