Should the results of our poll on the best British composers worry us?
‘What is the end of Fame?’ Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan. ‘Tis but to fill a certain portion of uncertain paper.’ What he meant, I think (with poetry it’s always hard to know), is that striving for lasting fame is pointless because we have little idea of what the future will look like, or whether posterity will have any desire to celebrate our achievements.
That thought struck me when looking at the fascinating poll published in this magazine. Some 167 leading musicians were asked to name their five favourite British composers from any era, and the results have been collated into a popularity league table.
I was pleased to see some unexpected names among the top 25. Elizabeth Maconchy, for instance – arguably the most undervalued of 20th-century British composers – is named as a favourite by seven of the musicians who responded. But I was also perturbed by the top five names on the list – Britten, Elgar, Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Byrd. Not because I don’t think they are wonderful composers. No, it’s because of my suspicion that, had this poll been conducted 25, 50 or even 75 years ago, it may well have been topped by the same five names – given that Britten, the most recent composer among the five, had already gathered a large following of supportive musicians around him by the time he was 35. And remember, this is a poll of professional musicians, not ordinary music-lovers whose tastes (we always assume) lag behind whatever the cutting-edge in composition currently is.
So what conclusion do we draw? Did those five composers tap into such a potent seam of inspiration that they will forever be ‘top of the charts’? Despite what Byron wrote, is posterity proving to be rather predictable when it comes to classical music? In another 25 or 50 years, if leading musicians are asked to name their favourite British composers will they still be saying ‘Britten, Elgar, Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Byrd – of course’? That’s a depressing prospect. It suggests that no matter how much fine music is written by the composers today and tomorrow (and it’s good to see younger names such as Helen Grime featuring at least in the top 25), they will never reach the heights of popularity achieved by composers who lived in earlier centuries.
But there may be another, more hopeful explanation. For much of my 46-year stint as a music journalist, contemporary music was – to be blunt – confined in a sort of cultural ghetto. That was the result of decades of extreme modernism and serialism, as exemplified by
