ABSTRACT
Labels are like beacons for critics, useful for getting one’s bearings and as a way of framing the listening experience for listeners. Composers tend to be less keen to accept the glare that a label can impose upon them. They may wish to situate themselves in relation to particular schools of practice and thought, but ultimately most will want to have their work judged on its own terms and for it to have its own unique, self-determined character. The composer’s work is then regarded as having that distinctive something that is not reducible to, or viewed to be in the shadow of, the work of other composers. The ‘anxiety of influence’1 has been a prevalent notion for much of the twentieth century. Composers have had to grapple with the desire to forge new ways of making music and to escape the grip of past musical models, while also searching for clues about how to do this in existing examples of other composers’ music.2
