The 1990s are still too recent for all but the most self-assured critic or musicologist to offer a confident assessment of compositional profit and loss. Talk of a decade which sustained or even enhanced the typically late-modern pluralism of the twentieth century’s last quarter may therefore be both premature and bland, but it is not necessarily misguided. For many close followers of the British scene, their most potent memories will be of a diversity vividly realized in the consolidation of three particular reputations: in order of age, Harrison Birtwistle, John Tavener and Mark-Anthony Turnage. The suggestion here of two wings and a centre can easily be fleshed out with other names – composers who can be made to fit into the avant-garde, minimalist and mainstream pigeonholes respectively. The outcome is a sense of a well-balanced variety, the extremes set off against the middle. But to deem this a healthy state of affairs is to risk accusations of complacency from those who think differently.
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