Some time ago a colleague on the HBS Committee took strenuous exception to someone describing Brian as a ‘working-class composer’. He has a point. The term ‘working-class composer’ is almost a contradiction in terms, composing music, especially ‘serious’ music, is not a characteristically working-class activity. Even the liveried composers at 19th century courts generally enjoyed sufficient status to lift them above the working-class category attached to most domestic servants.

Even in a society where class is as strong as it was in 19th and early 20th century England, differences in attitudes and behaviour between the classes are seldom black and white absolutes. They are more matters of emphasis and degree, and within any class there will always be many individuals who espouse attitudes or patterns of behaviour commonly thought of as belonging to some quite different class. Any reference to the influence of an individual’s class background must be understood as a reference to the insidious influence of a vaguely defined and changing ethos, rather than of a closely-defined set of received values. We create our own values from the materials available to us, and our social background provides only some very raw, raw materials. That said, certain, broad differences between the classes and their likely influence on an artistically sensitive youngster’s development can be discerned.

One such difference is in aesthetic attitudes. The dominant tendency in the middle-class has been to value a work of art for its elegance, clarity, economy of means and ‘sophistication’. Many middle-class youngsters are methodically educated to believe that adherence to these criteria is synonymous with ‘good taste’, and that anything which is not in good taste is, ipso facto, an appeal to man’s baser instincts (and therefore not serious art, yes, we have heard of someone who enjoys Brian’s music but ‘doubts its value’!)

If Brian was indeed surrounded by such attitudes as a child, need we be surprised that solidity is such a marked feature of his characteristic musical expression? Superficial critics may tend to dismiss the resultant rich textures as mere turgidity, but in fact Brian is doing what any honest and truly sensitive creative artist does, embodying in his work the values of the society which helped to create him. This aspect of his style is as much part of his creative birthright as a ‘middle-class’ reticence and spareness is of Benjamin Britten’s.

It would obviously be wrong to suggest that the only aspect of Brian’s youthful environment which influenced his creative development was his social class. There were, for example, peculiarities about the social role accorded to music in the time and place of Brian’s childhood and adolescence. In an area such as North Staffordshire during the latter half of the 19th century a very large proportion of all musical activity would have been associated with religion or some form of competition. Both in moral and practical terms music would appear as a deadly serious business connected with the pursuit of excellence.