especially if Robin Holloway is doing the turning. I do rather wonder whether Mr Holloway (for the best of whose works I have considerable admiration) may, consciously and/or otherwise, have developed what discretion and etiquette might prompt me to call a very particular view of the rôles of traditions, well-trodden paths and so on in relation to his own and some of his contemporaries' music; without going into the details of why I suggest this, I think that I may nevertheless have good reason for doing so...
I really don't know what exactly you are saying above.
Never mind; I was just endeavouring to be careful in what I wrote and am continuing in similar vein...
I can't share your view of Holloway's work
I'm less than convinced that you are certain what that view may be; I am by no means an unequivocal admirer of what he has done, as might have been deduced by my reference to the "best" of his work, a particularly fine example of which, to me, is the very Second Concerto for Orchestra to which t_i_n has subsequently referred.
it seems to me (like that of many a British composer, especially those associated with Oxbridge) to have little in the way of emotional content, or to provoke and stimulate the mind, or to enter into some meaningful relationship with the rest of the world and its cultural side; rather simply to exhibit various self-consciously 'musical' attributes which the musically educated can tick off in the right boxes, of which they can feel they are terribly clever/sophisticated/musically refined for having identified.
Whilst I know and indeed share, in principle, your view of the kind of phenomenon to which you refer here, it is not for me specifically to ascribe such descriptors to Robin Holloway or cite him as a classic example thereof, even though he may be regarded as a doyen of at least half of the Oxbridge scene...
In other words, it is music that serves no purpose other than a wholly reactionary one - to bolster the and help consolidate the socially divisive status of an elite. If asked by people outside of this bottom-patting gentlemen's club what relevance this music might be to them, to their lives, or anything else, I would have to answer 'none' - it's music like that which makes that question itself all the more meaningful, I reckon.
At (or just before) this point I got me coat and took me ball away to play elsewhere; quite simply, I neither buy the concept that you put forward in your first sentence here nor see that Holloway's work subscribes deliberately or even unwittigly to any such notion or intent. I do not visit gentlemen's clubs and wouldn't go patting bottoms therein if I did, so I admit to being entirely out of my depth here...
I don't know everything of his, and would be prepared to reconsider if any suggested a work to which I might have a different response.
Perhaps you might then consider lending at least half an ear to that Concerto when time permits, then...
