Thus opens the first essay in this volume of selected writings by Bayan Northcott. Born in 1940, Northcott is one of Britain's most eminent music critics, and this anthology amounts to a veritable ‘mind map’ of his critical and aesthetic preoccupations and concerns. Northcott's career as a journalist began in the 1970s, and the writings from this early period – occasional pieces, published in the New Statesman, Music and Musicians, and the Sunday Telegraph – addressed issues chiefly associated with post-1945 British and American music. None of the forty-seven items included in this present volume, however, dates from before 1980, and three quarters of them originally appeared in The Independent, the newspaper for which Northcott was chief music critic between 1988 and 2004. This period of association with The Independent proved to be extremely important, granting him ‘the unique opportunity to work out an aesthetic position […] in a regular series of c.1,200-word lead pieces for the Arts Page’ (viii). These items, together with others included in the book, are journalistic pieces of the very highest quality, demonstrating his mastery of the mini-essay in prose that is crisp, precise, and vibrant.

The invitation to compile a collection of his own writings came from Christopher Wintle, director of Plumbago Books and Arts, the publisher of the volumes that have emanated recently from the Hans Keller Archive,Footnote ¹ and in whose ‘Poetics of Music’ series The Way We Listen Now is the latest offering. So that this ‘modest collection’ of critical writings could ‘transcend the state of a mere miscellany’ (vii), Wintle and Northcott agreed on a series of essays on ‘the composition, dissemination, criticism and socio-economics of music’ (vii). The resulting book is divided into five parts and is arranged thematically. Parts 1 and 5 are broadly concerned with musical perception, compositional structure, expression, and silence; Part 2 addresses the relationship between words and music (song setting, speech and music, librettos, and poets); Part 3 surveys composers from Bach to Judith Weir; and Part 4 considers the fortunes and vicissitudes of classical music during the last three decades.

The passage quoted at the head of this review is a typical example of the way Northcott often begins an essay by approaching the main subject matter from a relatively oblique angle. The subject matter in this case is musical memory and the different ways in which it is employed – whether by a composer ‘to recapture and develop an inspiration that may have flashed though the consciousness months, even years, before the work is begun’ (3), by a pianist in order to memorize a score and get ‘a work “under” or “into” the fingers’ (4), or by a listener in order to ‘recall and savour long passages of favourite works’ (5). Various satellite ideas orbit the central theme, including the resilience of some of Schoenberg's densest and fiercest serial works, the ‘turbid flux’ of scores associated with the ‘New Complexity’, and the ‘monotonous trundle’ of certain minimalist pieces (4).

The positioning of this essay as the first of the collection serves to expose some of the essential issues and themes that emerge as one progresses through the book. Its references to Hans Keller are a case in point. Northcott's writings and views on music have earned him the reputation of a critic closely affiliated with the Keller school of thought, and this collection is replete with reverent nods to a number of Keller's phrases and ideas, especially concerning Stravinsky: the ‘tense stasis of opposing dynamisms’ that enable the composer to propel his music forward with seemingly unabated vigour whilst simultaneously encountering strong resistance at every turn, and his achievement in general, which can be considered ‘as overpowering as the discovery of the diatonic scale or the tone row’ (20). It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that Northcott throughout the book pays special attention to composers that Keller himself advocated: Mozart, Beethoven, Britten, Schoenberg, and – once again – Stravinsky. Originally published in 1992, the pair of essays located at the very heart of Part 1 focus their attention on these two last-mentioned composers. In ‘Could I But Express …’ (22–5) Northcott praises the ‘extra-historical integrity’ of Stravinsky's middle-period works, which, though ‘once considered merely artificial, modish or reactionary[,] have come to appeal – and, indeed, to move’ (25); and in ‘The Expressionist Movement’ (26–8) he describes the way in which Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), ‘in their radical authenticity, their intensity of colour and expression and corresponding audacity of harmony and formal process[,] will doubtless retain their impact as still, in certain ways, the most modern music ever written’ (28).

Another key theme that appears at various points throughout the book is the author's critique of minimalism. The most concentrated focus on the topic appears as the seventh essay in Part 4, impishly titled ‘Less Means Less’. Originally published in The Independent in 1988, the piece offers a general critical assessment of the movement before focusing on two then-contemporary minimalist offerings, John Adams's Nixon in China (1987) and Philip Glass's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1988). Adams's opera, according to Northcott, has ‘an infinitely cleverer libretto and his own command of pacing is wider than Glass's steady chug. Yet the effect is much the same: an opera laid out in the usual lengths but filled with noodlings instead of “real” music’ (167). The essay concludes with the author lamenting that

Whether or not readers agree with Northcott's viewpoint, they will be unable to deny the élan with which it is articulated.

Northcott's ‘musical question of the twentieth century’ is discussed at greater length further on in Part 4 in an essay originally published in 2001, provocatively titled ‘Fear and Loathing of Modern Music’. Here Northcott makes reference to what he terms the ‘reflexivity of European tradition’, an apparently Keller-inspired notion that Northcott defines as ‘the practice of simultaneously invoking and meaningfully contradicting familiar musical expectations to yield ever fresh significances’ (175). He sees such values being exhibited in the music of Alexander Goehr, Nicholas Maw, Robin Holloway, and David Matthews. It is a list to which Northcott could have added his own name. Indeed, his modest compositional output, chiefly for small-scale forces,Footnote ² displays all the hallmarks of an essentially traditionalist composer. What Rosemary Williamson calls his ‘reworkings of classical procedures in his own terms’Footnote ³ can be witnessed throughout his œuvre, from the opening sonata-form movement of his first acknowledged work, Sonata for Solo Oboe, Op. 1 (1978), to the ground bass finale of his later Concerto for Horn and Ensemble, Op. 8 (1990–98).

The essays in the book that deal with compositional procedure and technique suggest a composer with a practical, workaday mind. Addressing the matter of inspiration in ‘Compose Yourself’ (6–9), Northcott is clearly of the opinion that it is more down to a composer's ‘skill, luck, problem-solving and so on’ than to advice and guidance offered by certain self-indulgent composer-texts that amount to nothing less than ‘religious tracts’.Footnote ⁴ In another essay, ‘Fain Would I Change That Note’ (32–6), originally a script for BBC Radio 3's Music Weekly, he challenges our notion of what new music is – should it simply be original or innovative, or are there other factors that should be taken into account? It is these essays that give perhaps the most explicit insight into the values, beliefs, and interests that lie behind his own writings and compositions.

In addition to the essays concerned with well-known musical figures and topics, The Way We Listen Now also includes a number of stand-alone journalistic pieces that are more quirky in nature. ‘Last Waltz?’ (188–90), for instance, is a wry look at the dominance and tyranny of duple time; ‘Echoes from Selborne’ (201–3) focuses on Gilbert White, the naturalist and ornithologist who, amongst his other concerns, ‘wondered whether all owls hooted in the key of B flat’ (201); and the first essay of the fifth and final part of the book (193–7) traces different ways of ending a piece of music. The most striking moment in Part 5, however, is to be found in the final essay, ‘The Rest is Silence’. By taking the reader full circle back to the start of the collection, Northcott reaffirms his hope, expressed in the Preface, that the book should be read and understood as a ‘coherent whole’ (viii):