ABSTRACT
A more rewarding approach is to study the response to modern music by cultural ‘liberals’, those who viewed themselves as open-minded and sympathetic to ‘progress’ in art just as in society. Liberal critics were acutely aware of the mistakes of their predecessors who had condemned composers later to be acclaimed as masters. They accepted that there were no timeless rules for musical composition, and that style and technique would always change. A study of the post-Victorian musical liberals not only tells us about the early response to musical modernism in Britain and the reasons why it caused unease. Liberal music critics accepted the need for change in the arts just as in society. But modern music seemed to represent the wrong kind of change. The reactions to modern music by liberal critics display the characteristic anxieties of the Victorian intellectual class about the social and cultural transformations of their world after 1880.
