John Harbison and his music

Extract

At any point in history there are always a few solid, value-for-money composers who ignore all vogue and convention and just quietly get on with the job of composing the music that is inside them, waiting to be written down. Abjuring all fashions and trends, all movements and isms, they defy the bizarre human compulsion to categorize and pigeon-hole and lump into groups. I have a strong feeling that it is these unclassifiable, dogged individualists who carry the flag of music history forward: who form the handful of composers by whom each epoch is remembered and represented in centuries to come. While second-guessing posterity is one of the more fatuously pointless of human activities, it is a reasonable certainty that John Harbison is one such figure.