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’. It is a mark of the effectiveness of an artistic revolution when young radicals become the creative establishment Far from quaint regionalists, the Manchester School were radically anti-parochial. All enjoyed stellar
