Why I booed Birtwistle

With the passing of Sir Harrison Birtwistle last month we are witness to a changing of the guard in new classical music. For 70-odd years contemporary music in the West was dominated by a highly exclusive atonal mode of thought that produced works that were hostile to the wider music-loving public and written for a small but highly subsidised cultural circle.

If it was spontaneous when it began, the atonal idiom – meaning a highly dissonant style – quickly ossified into a kind of luxury backwater of music, so obscure it couldn’t even be questioned, yet endlessly backed by public subsidy which the public could nevertheless never challenge. It became an immovable impediment to other musical idioms that might better serve the public and retain an audience in the broader sense.

Seeing this deeply ingrained problem for what it was, by the early 1990s a small group of like-minded composers and music lovers (of which I was one) – people who wanted to see a more open landscape in which the naturally melodious and harmonious instincts of music creators could once again be permitted to operate – got together and began to ask what could be done.

We were facing a political problem as much as a musical one. The issue was not that atonal music was being written and played; I would defend the right of anyone to express themselves musically exactly as they wish. It was a political problem in that an entire, lavishly subsidised establishment arose around this culture, who – quite frankly – had their snouts in a deep trough of public money and had no incentive whatever for anything to change.

The answer seemed to be to shine a light, to raise debate and to gain attention for alternative paths forward for new classical music; in other words, to open up the field, let daylight in and allow the profound need for music of the heart to once again be allowed to be served.

But how to do this? On a train bound for London in early 1994, with several allies, the conversation turned to mounting some sort of peaceful direct action or civil disobedience.