So ends the Foreword to Michael Tippett's ‘agit-prop play’ War Ramp, ‘which was performed in various Labour party premises in or near London during 1935’. As Tippett put it in his autobiography, written many years later, ‘during this period I was moving towards a major artistic statement of all that I felt about the state of the world. War Ramp was one attempt in this direction, but an unsatisfactory one’; ‘looking back at Handel's Messiah and the Bach Passions … led me to realise that if I could not make my big statement work effectively in the actual theatre, I could do so in a dramatic piece for the concert hall’. A Child of Our Time was the result, and not everyone agrees that it effectively confronts a ‘political problem’, not least because musical, aesthetic elements tend to fuse the political with that strangely positive aura that pertains to all but the least successful artworks.

The dilemma of how best to relate musical expression to political conviction persists. Back in the 1970s, ‘those addressing themselves with great determination to evolving a function for themselves as musicians and a music which will “serve the struggle of the people”’ could be brought under the aesthetic umbrella of experimentalism, in ‘an attempt to resolve … “the crippling contradiction in modern bourgeois art”, namely that “those artists who have achieved a revolution within their individual artistic languages have rendered their own efforts a useless nonsense, because of their works’ total lack of revolutionary content”’. Having used these comments by Alan Brett, an associate of Cornelius Cardew, Michael Nyman ended his book called Experimental Music by quoting ‘Soon’, a ‘community song’ in F major inspired by Mao Tse-tung which indicates the extent of Cardew's progression away from the mainstream avant-gardism of his earlier years’.