For this chapter we return to Aldeburgh, where we started. Jonathan Reekie was Chief Executive of Aldeburgh Music from 1998 to 2014. ‘What kept me there’, he says, ‘was the combination of the inspirational place [and] the richness of the Britten legacy.’ His response to the place and the legacy was expressed in his broad and adventurous programming, crowned by the celebrated Peter Grimes performed on Aldeburgh beach in 2013, and by his appointment of Artistic Directors in the tradition set by Britten, with both composers and performers in the role. Reekie was also concerned to develop a community and education programme that would be forward-looking, whilst also drawing on the vision Britten had regarding the role of music – and musicians – within the community.

One recent project was Friday Afternoons, which began as an opportunity to bring together Suffolk school pupils in 2013 on what would have been Britten’s hundredth birthday to sing the songs that Britten wrote for children – Friday Afternoons, and which culminated on 22 November 2013 as an international happening with close to 70,000 people taking part.

A second long-term venture has been in HMP & YOI Warren Hill, a local prison. The ‘usefulness’ there is about developing not only musical and artistic skills, but also, vitally, social skills – so useful to these young men: how to work in a group, work to a deadline, compromise, refine, perfect.

In this article, Jonathan Reekie takes Britten’s ‘Holy Triangle’ and asks whether the model still holds for today, both in general and more specifically in post-Britten 21st-century Aldeburgh. Each section begins with an extract from the Aspen Lecture.

In his Aspen speech of 1964, Benjamin Britten defined what he went on to describe as ‘this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener’. It is an image that can be read as a sender-carrier-receiver description of music. Britten’s model, however, is not linear and serial but interactive and simultaneous – something more elusive, mysterious. The key word is ‘together’.