Stravinsky, Varèse and John Adams.

We might as well start by stating that this article will not provide any solution to the problem of how to compose in your own historical time. Like an academic character from a David Lodge novel it will instead, ‘merely seek to raise some interesting questions around the topic’. The following points came to mind during and after the recent RTÉ Living Music Festival. This piece will also not be a review of that event, which is dealt with elsewhere in this JMI.

Stravinsky said something like, ‘On the question of writing the music of the future? … I am happy to write the music of the present.’ While Varèse, whose music sounded, in its day, ‘futuristic’ and more modern than Stravinsky’s, said...