Letter: Freedom to B flat

Freedom to B flat

Since the dawn of orchestral music, composers have always been held back from writing exactly as they wished, by those that commissioned and consumed the symphonies, sonatas and concertos. Music in any tradition has long been governed by what those paying for it expect to hear.

The "forty years of madness" which began in 1945 signalled not the beginning of the end of "classical" composition, as Julian Lloyd Webber asserts ("Stop the dictators of modern music", 2 Feb- ruary), but the dawn of artistic freedom.

DAVID KERNOHAN

Leicester