Some juvenilia apart, Lord Berners (1883–1950) started composing as an advanced modernist. He was active in all the arts – he had drawn and painted since childhood, and was later a published writer. Throughout World War I, Gerald Tyrwhitt (as he was then known) lived in Rome, where he was honorary attaché at the British Embassy. Rome was a centre of innovation, especially in the visual arts, and Diaghilev lived there. Because of his temperament and his access to international culture, Berners was among the first of British composers to absorb harmonic and rhythmic procedures from Stravinsky and Schoenberg in their works of the immediate pre-war period.

Like other pioneers, Berners is difficult to accommodate into the picture of British music at this time. Cyril Scott, who also developed his reputation abroad, is a precursor but hardly an influence. His First Piano Sonata (1908) is remarkable for its date, but its expansive use of varying metres is far removed from Berners’ aphoristic early works, although it belongs to the tradition of rhetorical British sonatas that includes that of Bridge (1921–4). More relevant are Scott's Poems (1912) for piano, where five of the composer's poems (he was a published poet and translator) precede the music. Scott's originality earned him the title ‘the English Debussy’, much as Berners’ sense of humour caused him to be called ‘the English Satie’. It is interesting to compare Scott's Rainbow Trout (1916) with Berners’ Le Poisson d’or (1915) (Exx. 3, 4).

Scott's piece was published the year after Berners wrote his. Berners was working, as it were, in two dimensions, for he wrote a little poem in French at the head of the score, which is dedicated to Stravinsky – Berners met him in 1911, came to know him well and was in the habit of showing his music to him. He asked Stravinsky's permission for the dedication when Le Poisson d’or was published in 1919. In a sense there is a further dimension for both Scott and Berners, since they are illustrating the movements of their respective fishes – a type of depiction found in Debussy's Poissons d’or, La Mer and some of the Préludes as well as Stravinsky's ballets.