This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Survival of the Symphony, given by Alexander Goer, was originally broadcast in 1987.

To think of modern music in an age of eclecticism as no more than yet another style is to miss its essential point.

Modernism developed in the last century among artists deliberately attacking conventionality. They weren't slow to see that banality was a symptom of

a disease contracted by art and artists in bourgeois society. At the time, the disease had a name. It was called decoration.

Art was banal and conventional, as soon as it served no higher purpose than to ornament or

divert its audience, and it was misunderstood and condemned whenever it aimed to be more than

decorative. The bourgeoisie found it ugly, grotesque, and full of willful distortions of their idealised

view of the world. As likely as not, modernists were incompetent, not prudently masking

their deficiencies, but flouting them for all to see. Now, a hundred years later, modernist painting,

literature, and the music which followed them are classics. As with any significant art, the

study of structural detail will help us to familiarize ourselves with style, but doesn't necessarily

reveal the prophetic achievement of modernism.

It forecasts future realities rather than reflect society's own image of itself.

The visionary dimension of modernist art goes hand in hand with a regret for the past.

At the beginning of civilization, art was integrated into everyday life,

and it still is in some places.

Stravinsky's right of spring evokes a mythical past.

Verrez's apartment in New York was a jumble of musical instruments of exotic origin.

Even the second Viennese school looked back longingly at the music of 18th century Vienna. They wanted to put music back at the

centre and not out on the fringes of life. Not that every artist who calls himself avant-garde

shares the philosophy of modernism. Avanguard used to be a

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