The idea I have in mind is to compare the situation on television today and thirty years ago of what persists in being known as classical music. I write as an academic, but this will not be a normal academic paper. For one thing, I shall not do any special research but base myself instead on memory and autobiographical experience, because thirty years ago, before becoming an academic, I began by writing music criticism and making documentaries on music for television. My intention is to say something as a participant observer about the alteration of the cultural context in which this thing called classical music operates, and about the part that television has played in this.

One of the persistent features of Peter Maxwell Davies's music has been the use of musical material borrowed from medieval and renaissance sources. His interest in the music of this period has not of course been in its abstract musical forms, which represent aesthetic ideals now unattainable, but in themes of faith and belief which it can be used to symbolise for us. Like Adrian Leverkiihn, the composer-hero of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, Davies is concerned with the dilemma that in a godless world, to create God after one's own image is to call up the devil.