A distinct change in tone became apparent in British music criticism after 1918 as conventional journalistic reporting began to give way to the forceful assertion of individual opinion. For a new generation of critics, music became a more serious business, requiring every available rhetorical weapon in the defence of true artistic values. Their impatience with contemporary concert life and its routine programming was matched by their iconoclastic attitude to many of the public's most venerated composers. In seeking to redress the balance between fashionable taste and the large amount of worthwhile music they believed it prevented from being heard, they became passionate advocates for the work of their contemporaries as well as for neglected music of both the recent and remote pasts. They were provocative in the service of their chosen causes and unconcerned if the expression of their views caused offence. Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) and Cecil Gray are among the most prominent representatives of this new trend that emerged between the wars, and they were outspoken in their revolt against everything that seemed stuffy and provincial in British musical life. They discovered their ideal of the dedicated artist in Bernard van Dieren, whose sophisticated cosmopolitanism and artistic integrity contrasted starkly with what they saw as the dispiriting mediocrity around them. They looked to him as a mentor, and admired him to the point of hero-worship.

Bernard van Dieren (1887–1936) was one of the most elusive and enigmatic figures in British musical life of the period. He first came to London from the Netherlands in 1909 as music correspondent for various Dutch newspapers. By the time he was twenty he had succeeded in publishing a number of compositions, although his musical training seems to have amounted to little more than a few violin lessons. He was a man of varied interests and wide attainments: in addition to composing, these ranged from medicine (in which he appears to have had some early training) to bookbinding, and in 1920 he published a monograph on the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with whom he was personally acquainted. By 1908 he had met Ferruccio Busoni – through his wife, who had been a pupil – and a friendship grew up between the two men that proved to be of the greatest significance for van Dieren's creative and intellectual development.