Sonic sewage
Sir: We should all be indebted to Sir John Drummond for including Sir Harrison Birtwistle's 'Panic' at the last night of the Proms because it has at last given the wider public the chance to compare its reaction to this kind of absurdity with the insane drool- ings of professional music critics. Last week, Richard Littlejohn (Diary) summed it all up by saying 'Panic' was like being pre- sented with 'cold sick', whilst your own learned Robin Holloway, my former teach- er, gushed that Birtwistle's 'choice of sub- ject was spot-on', that the racket had `inward lyricism' and that to living com- poser could have faced such a challenge [as writing for the last night of the Proms] so naturally and so successfully'.
When I founded a group called The Hecklers last year, our first mission was to boo the revival of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's `Gawain' at Convent Garden. At the time we had a publicity problem: all the music critics seem to revere the establishment frauds, whilst few outside the tiny world of classical music were prepared to stick up for us because they did not even know what the 'music' we boo is like and, more proba- bly, had not even heard of 'composers' such as Sir Harrison Birtwistle.
Let us hope that the loony modernist `composers' can at last be given continual massive exposure of the sort achieved by `Panic' and that their idiocy and that of the current classical music critics can finally be exposed. The scandal of taxpayers' money (via the Arts Council) and licence payers' money (via the BBC) being spent on sonic sewage will at last be properly attacked and stopped.
Frederick Stocken
7 Smith Square, London SW1
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