It was early one morning at a hotel breakfast table in Hesse that I had the pivotal conversation with George E. Lewis. That sweltering summer of 2018 we were both teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Course, a biennial happening in provincial south-west Germany that started up after the Second World War and has become an improbable new-music Mecca. Lewis – an African-American composer, trombonist and intellectual powerhouse – was a generous and jovial presence around campus that year with his resplendent chuckle and inspirational lectures on decolonising the canon. (I was meanwhile attempting to teach a bunch of fierce-minded students how to write about new music. Their conclusion: grab the subject by both shoulders, use words with wit and abandon. They were wonderful.)

On the last morning of seminars, over rye bagels and coffee, I finally summoned the courage to ask Lewis’s advice about a notion I’d been mulling over for a while. ‘George,’ I ventured. ‘I’m thinking of writing some sort of new history of twentieth-century composers. I don’t mean the usual suspects. I mean composers who get left out. What do you reckon?’

Anyone who has been in Lewis’s company will recognise what came next. He nodded a breezy nod. The sort of nod that says: No big deal, what are you waiting for? ‘Sure,’ he said, taking a bite of his bagel. ‘Someone’s gotta write that book. It’s way overdue. You should do it.’ But! I argued against my own case. Isn’t the proposition too vague? Too vast? Too reductive? Too — ‘Why should it be?’ he shrugged. ‘Choose some interesting composers who don’t make it into the mainstream history books. Tell their stories. Prove that they were all doing amazing stuff. Prove that they existed. Make your readers want to hear their music. What’s reductive about that? Oh, it’s time.’ With that, he drained his coffee and left me to it.

‘Tell their stories.’

• • •

As a kid growing up in a cottage in rainy rural Scotland, I became obsessed with classical music. Who can say why, exactly, given five of my six brothers are folk musicians, but classical music is what caught my tiny ear. I fixated on the sounds emerging from the kitchen radio (ever tuned to BBC Radio 3) and from the family tape collection, which, alongside Bob Dylan and Planxty, included Mozart’s late symphonies, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and the thrillingly titled compilation The Greatest Hits of the 17th Century. Noticing how often I would fall asleep clutching my little Fisher-Price tape machine, Monteverdi madrigals playing on repeat, my parents bought me audio books about the lives of the ‘great composers’ for children. I inhaled those tales of Beethoven with his ear trumpets in Vienna, flame-haired Vivaldi on his gondola romps around Venice, Tchaikovsky heading off on steam trains to ‘discover America’. These became the legends that framed the music I loved. The music I still love.

That was the 1980s. As the years passed, I pursued the radical innovation of classical music into twentieth-century repertoire – and when I reached the margins of the mainstream and discovered the ear-altering sounds made there using everything from sirens to silence, something began to irk. Why were so many innovative figures missing from my history books? It kept happening. Throughout undergraduate and postgraduate music studies in Canada and the UK, as a newspaper music critic in my twenties, now as a presenter for BBC Radio 3 – why did the official narrative, the concert programmes, the festival line-ups, always revolve so narrowly around the same clutch of ‘core’ composers that I’d learned about in my kids’ stories? Why were they so exclusively white and so male, so European and so American? Where were all the others? Because there were plenty of others. There are.

Things have changed somewhat in the decade since I was a student. Even since that breakfast with George Lewis in 2018, mainstream conversations around race, gender, inclusion and the arts have shifted – to an extent. In the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement forced the issue into the headlines. Questions were asked, publicly and forcefully, about how we tell our histories and who gets to tell them. Statues were pulled down, alternative road names nailed up. There was a backlash. The term ‘culture wars’ reared its mucky head in the tabloids and in the mouths of government ministers intent on profiteering from division. Oxford University was accused of an ‘attack of the woke’ after it announced plans to broaden its music curriculum to include more non-Western traditions. To be clear: Oxford was not planning to drop any core repertoire from its syllabus, merely to extend the scope a little. Which it has done, as far as I know jeopardising neither the well-being of students nor the future of classical music.

Here is a myth I keep coming up against. It is an odd and spurious fear that The Great Works – the Passions of Bach, the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the earth-shaking ballets of Igor Stravinsky – are somehow threatened if classical music becomes more inclusive. Nobody is mooting that we should ditch Mozart or Mahler. Nobody is suggesting that their music doesn’t speak for our times and for all time. I would be the first to fight back if anyone did. So I wonder what fuels this pernicious insecurity that composers who are already in the fold will be devalued if border controls around the genre are relaxed. Societal parallels aren’t too hard to spot. It is the mentality of gate-keeping, of wall-building, of door-closing behind oneself.

The irony is that the opposite is true. Stagnation will be the death of any living art form. Defensiveness is what suffocates. The longevity of the whole classical music ecosystem depends on embracing the boldest and broadest sounds as much as breathing new life into beloved old ones. The score of a Beethoven symphony is a blueprint for revolution but performed in a vacuum its message is mute. Healthy musical culture depends on who’s playing, who’s listening, who’s genuinely impacted. The visionary director Graham Vick said that if opera has a place in the world, it must be of the world. He refused to watch the music he loved become ‘the guarded privilege of an ever-smaller section of British society’, so he took opera out of its hallowed spaces and got citizens of Birmingham singing Verdi. This was no tokenism. Disproving the false dichotomy between inclusion and excellence time and time again, Vick showed that opera can enrich every life, and in fact that the strength of the genre relies on it doing so.

Compensating for a lack of diversity in classical music of past eras is a genuine stumper. We cannot readily make up for the opportunities denied to nearly everyone except white men of previous centuries, though we must make darn sure we shout about the courageous composers who did manage to write music in spite of the odds. However: there is no excuse for ignoring the explosion of creative voices made possible by social changes around the globe after 1900. The composer Charles Seeger, husband of Ruth Crawford, admitted he had a ‘not-very-high’ opinion of female composers ‘based mostly upon the absence of mention of them in the histories of music’. Seeger wasn’t alone in his lazy assumption that if we don’t generally read about someone, or hear their music much in concerts, they probably aren’t good enough to be included. It’s a myth of absence that pervades much of the industry. More fool us. What ear-expanding sounds we’ve been missing.

I write this book out of love and anger. The love: because I want to shout from the rooftops that classical music is gripping, essential, personally and politically game-changing. The anger: because I can’t shout proudly about a culture that wilfully closes its doors on perceived outsiders. And it does. The Brazilian musicologist Paulo Costa Lima, who has been a great help in my research on Walter Smetak and Bahian composers of the 1960s, wrote this to me: ‘Is “neglect” a mere slip of our musicological machine, or’, he suggested, ‘is it the very essence and substance’ of how the classical music industry operates? Costa Lima pointed out that continuing to celebrate established ‘centres’ at the exclusion of ‘peripheries’ is a reaffirmation that the rest of the world ‘is not capable of producing valid propositions’. In other words, he perceives Western-centric musicology as ‘a colonialist enterprise renewed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’.

If classical music is serious about wanting change, it needs to reclaim its innate and vital sense of adventure. I mean adventurous listening as well as adventurous creating. The kind of listening that makes us vulnerable, that reawakens us, that ‘unmakes us, but steadies us again’, in the words of the modernist writer Nan Shepherd, who roamed the Cairngorms her whole life in search of surprise. If we want to embrace a genuine range of life experiences, we’ll need to stop prescribing and start embracing a genuine range of sound. Various orchestras...