This article by the author originally appeared in Isis (Oxford), 23 February 1955.

Youthful music critics who know enough to be able to follow complex patterns but not enough to have been disenchanted of the chimera of originality tend to be tolerant in their discussion of present-day musical production; within limits, the nastier a noise the more likely they are to hail it as good, as ‘modern’ music, but the enlightened junior Beckmesser can take most things from Vaughan Williams to Searle, Henze and the latest Stravinsky. One kind of music, however, one just does not write nowadays – it uses the diatonic scale, goes through a series of intelligible modulations from one key to another and resolves most of its dissonances. So that when Dr. Rubbra produces, in his Sixth Symphony, a work displaying all these characteristics and it is hailed, by those our critic respects, as a fine, even a great work, the latter is in considerable perturbation. His magnanimity has let him down – surely he has made his definition of legitimacy pretty inclusive: why can't people play the game?

Let us be fair; our critic is not just being over-sophisticated, blasé, sensation-seeking or snobbish; he has found, over a period of years, that it is at least workable to regard music as a criticism of life, related to its time; moreover, certain tendencies, scientific, philosophical and particularly psychological, in the life of the present century have given him a modern world-picture, and he can relate to it anything from Vaughan Williams to Berg, and even on good days to Skalkottas.