ABSTRACT
It may seem a paradox that we often experience, and even define, the modern through an increasing ache lor a past which we have ourselves constructed. The invention and reinvention of tradition have been constant companions of the urge within nineteenth- and twentieth-century states to modernise: to industrialise, to electrify, to build and rebuild. As all that is solid in our metropolitan environments melts into air, we turn to a set of representations which can give us, however fleetingly, a feeling of connection with time and space. As modernity's roadscapes, factories and factory farms destroy the countryside, a landscape drawn from an imaginary past becomes increasingly important. The Victorian (or older) house, the landscape art of a Constable, the fiction of a jane Austen, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera and concert music are a few of the favourite things of the English professional classes who perforce inhabit modernity but by choice also inhabit 'tradition'. 1 It is by no means, therefore, a paradox that post-industrial Britain is also Heritage Britain, a land of castles and cathedrals, country houses and agricultural theme parks, of art exhibitions and of the music festival. Music is often claimed to be among the most important of the national treasures: it is very much part of the solidities of Heritage Britain. And yet music, above all else, melts into air. . . .
