Well there must be SOME reason for it, which however I can't say I'm qualified to make any kind of authoritative statement on. Perhaps someone who's involved in putting on concerts of contemporary music in the UK might care to comment.

Before I left the UK, I was once on a panel organised by the British section of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) to choose which of the submitted works should go forward to an international jury which was rogramming the following year's ISCM World Music Days. In the course of initial discussions, in which we went through the list of submitted works, we came to a Knussen work listed there and one of my colleagues on the panel said "well, we have to put Olly's piece forward" - ie. this was assumed without anyone looking at the score or listening to the recording. This is the kind of "incredibly unchallenged pre-eminence" that t_i_n mentions.

Reiner, reread the posts: OK is not taking a pounding for not being diverse at all. Pretty much all the posters, including t_i_n, whom you misrepresent, have been at pains to agree that he is allowed to, and is indeed expected to, indulge his own tastes - and why not? We all would. The point at issue is to what extent he has been given hegemony by administrators over an organisation that could be using its influence and (spending) power more widely, as t_i_n eloquently argues. You are also misinformed about the funding situation: the LS gets a very big chunk of what Arts Council money there is for new music - not a large amount by European standards but a lot more than most of the rest of us put together. This is presumably so that at least one ensemble can 'compete' or keep up with our richer Continental colleagues, but you can see why others might be a little miffed when the artistic direction goes down a narrow pathway. The bottom line is that the Arts Council is not offering core funding to currently-unfunded ensembles at the moment. I asked them, and that was the response.

I wasn't making a fuss, and there's no need at all to apologise! But it wasn't what I was saying, I'm afraid

I do think his pre-eminence 'could withstand parallel activity ...'. Indeed, it does, in the most obvious sense that there is plenty of parallel activity! But what I actually meant (and still mean) by the phrase you quote was that I continue to be surprised by the number of contexts in which no one particularly seems to think twice as to whether everything Ollie does (or is asked to do) is wonderful.

As I've said already, I've heard many wonderful performances and recordings under his direction, but I've also heard very average Sinfonietta programmes where I really think they'd have been better off doing some Finnissy, Toovey, Butler, Horne, Gilbert etc. etc. (to name only some British composers they rarely if ever play) rather than giving Ollie yet another chance to conduct Kagel or Takemitsu.

And while I do think a lot of what OK composes is very good, the story Richard tells about the ISCM selection panel is typical of the unthinking deference which, as Colin said of Carter, one would hope Ollie doesn't want anyway. I don't see that it's in the interests of any musician, however great, to be said to be great by people who don't even listen (and Richard's story does rather beg the question of why, if these people all were so confident the piece would be wonderful, they didn't want to listen to it!).

Knussen remains the best English conductor of the works of Charles Ives that I've yet heard.

Everyone here is at pains to emphasise that he isn't being accused of being cynical, Aaron. Although I'm not sure he would know what "diversity" is.

The point is that it's counterproductive for any one person to have the kind of unquestioned influence over contemporary-music programmikng as he does, for all the reasons that various of us have stated. The combination of this deference on the part of programmers who should really have their own ideas, combined with (as James points out) the impossibility of anyone else coming along and setting up as an alternative to the LS because they wouldn't receive the funding to do so, means that a whole generation of listeners has been given a repertoire with a clear and fairly narrow stylistic agenda and told that this is the diversity of today's music.

I'm sure we'd all agree with your second point. As for the first, not quite interchangeably, I think: BCMG, ASKO and Aldeburgh have also been mentioned. Previously, say in the 1980s, there were indeed other groups such as Lontano (which still exists, I think, without anything like the same degree of visibility) and Music Projects, which acted as a counterbalance to the LS; and programmers such as Adrian Jack at the ICA and Pierre Audi at the Almeida Theatre who had "artistic directions" of their own. All of that has fallen away in the meantime. An honourable mention ought to be given to Radio 3 as well, whose "Hear and Now" programmes (and their "Music in our Time" predecessors) continue despite everything to reflect a fairly wide view of what's out there.

I have a strong feeling that there was a moment in the early 1980s when contemporary composition in the UK was beginning to look like one of the most vital "scenes" there was, but that very soon afterwards a small segment of this wide-ranging activity was selected for further promotion at the expense of everything else, and that the influence of a fairly small number of "players" (Knussen, Michael Vyner and his successors at the LS, the Faber publishing house, for example) was crucial in bringing this about and sustaining it to this day. I may be mistaken, and I don't have facts and figures at my fingertips to the extent that I probably should have, but that was my feeling then, and it still is.

Indeed not, and, as I say, this is still reflected by R3. Let's hope that at least continues.