W. H. Auden's poem ‘Musée des beaux arts’ is a response to a painting by the 16th-century Netherlands painter Pieter Breughel depicting the Fall of Icarus. Auden notes how violently contrasted emotions and activities actually coexist. How suffering takes place ‘While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’, and even during a martyrdom ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree’.

Auden embodies his awareness of these natural dichotomies in language which at times is as informal as the lyrics of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter. His range from the intellectual to the colloquial, and his blending of them, has always seemed to me to be a remarkable achievement, a factor in the striking individuality of his mind and verse. By comparison, composers, in the mid-twentieth century at least, have been less adaptable, less at home in what Henry Cowell called ‘the whole world of music’.

It has been difficult for composers of so-called serious music to identify a vernacular, even harder to identify with any of the available vernaculars in our segmented musical culture. The approach has sometimes been satirical: Kurt Weill had an axe to grind, and so did Maxwell Davies in St Thomas Wake and The Yellow Cake Revue. Tippett, on the other hand, has been more instinctively drawn to blues and jazz which have played an important part in some of his later works.

In my own music of the last decade there are two aspects which predominate. One is the attempt to use some kind of popular musical idiom within a larger context; the other is a search for the means to notate different kinds of music simultaneously. In these related aims, Ives provides a precedent which threatens the European notion of stylistic consistency. As one who was trained at Cambridge in the 1950s, I was warned not to start a composition in the style of Hindemith and soon lapse back into Brahms, which now does not seem very far away. When I heard Ives in live performances in New York, he seemed the only composer able to change style deliberately and convincingly as an integral part of a composition.