Howard Skempton drew intriguing parallels between Britten and Cornelius Cardew. Cardew, in his formative years, spent an extended time as teaching assistant to Stockhausen in Cologne. In this chapter Christopher Fox, a frequent visitor to Darmstadt, where Stockhausen taught, closes the circle by linking Darmstadt and Britten. Fox is a composer who also regularly writes about music and this chapter draws together many of the recurrent strands in his work: the idea of ‘experimental’ music, the role of music in different societies, and the relationship between music in Britain and the wider international music scene.

He presents an extended commentary on Noye’s Fludde, the quintessential Britten ‘community’ piece. Colin Matthews referred to ‘the vernacular’ as a means of maintaining musical contact with audiences but Fox proposes that we should also see works such as Terry Riley’s In C and Cardew’s The Great Learning as pieces which open up new and potentially more radical means of participation in contemporary music.

In this context Fox also acknowledges the significant and supportive role played by CoMA, (Contemporary Music for All), a British organisation founded in 1993 which has developed a new repertoire of flexible works for amateur participation.

One hot summer’s day about twenty years ago I took a taxi. I told the driver where I wanted to go, an address out on the edge of town. ‘I’ve been taking quite a few people there these last few days’, he said. ‘What’s going on?’ I explained that the place for which we were heading was one of the venues for a music festival, a festival founded in 1946. ‘Never heard of it’, he said.

Not Aldeburgh, of course. Hot days may be few and far between on the Suffolk coast but everyone there knows about the festival because, from its inception in 1948, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears wanted to make great music in the heart of the community in which they lived: as Pears said, ‘a modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends’. Instead, I was in Darmstadt, home of the Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik, the International Summer School for New Music.