When atonal music was original and exciting

In the 1960s and 1970s, British music was transfixed by the Manchester School. Led by the composers Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies, this northern powerhouse of art music also included the brilliant pianist John Ogden and the conductor Elgar Howarth. All five had studied in the city in the early 1950s. Yet what united them wasn’t geographical happenstance but the embrace of what Robert Hughes famously called, writing on modern art, ‘the shock of the new’.

Far from quaint regionalists, the Manchester School were radically anti-parochial. All enjoyed stellar international careers. Even more to the point, they reached across to international modernism, turning pre-war European tradition into the British cutting edge. There are echoes, in this lift away from cosy, middlebrow nativism towards the demanding big picture, of what happened in the lofts of 1950s New York as Abstract Expressionism exploded out of émigré modernism.