These were the words with which Elliott Carter accompanied his short duo for flute and bassoon, Au Quai, written to mark Oliver Knussen's 50th birthday in 2002. The year when Knussen's time (1952–2018) began is probably best known for two very different yet comparable events. First, the première in Paris on 4 May of Pierre Boulez's rigorously constructivist Structures 1a – his most forceful celebration of the new serial world that he then believed should logically follow from the death of Schoenberg on 13 July 1951, and representing what is sometimes called ‘the second modernism’, to distinguish that troublesome movement's most forceful phase from its less intransigently radical precursor. The other event is the first performance in America on 29 August of that archetypal avant-garde, experimental [non-] piece, John Cage's 4’33”.

It would probably be a simplification too far to see the entire development of Western classical music since 1952 in terms of activity within a field bounded by those demonstrations of avant-gardism at one extreme and by the persistence of more traditional kinds of music at the other: from 1952, Britten's second Canticle, Abraham and Isaac, or Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, for example. Nevertheless, adding in the fact that Stravinsky's Cantata on Old English Texts was first performed on 11 November 1952 doesn't exactly discourage grand generalisations about the importance to musical developments since that date of a kind of mainstream modernism that – to repeat some words penned by Robin Holloway soon after Britten's death – ‘has the power to connect the avant-garde with the lost paradise of tonality’, conserving and renovating ‘in the boldest and simplest manner’. Early in 1976, the year Britten died, Knussen himself had written to the composer in praise of the bold simplicity of Death in Venice. (He had first met Britten through his bass-playing father, and had been commissioned to compose a work for Aldeburgh, dedicated to Britten, in 1969.) Knussen's letter stressed