When Radio 3 presenter and critic Kate Molleson was a child, she would take her Fisher-Price tape machine to bed, clutching it like a cuddly toy, falling asleep to Monteverdi madrigals. Her love of Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky followed soon after; then her interests moved to ambitious modern composers, many of whom were not western, male, white or in any history books.
In this clever and accessible collection of essays, Molleson lays out her case for 10 of these artists, saying their work is still sidelined because of an “odd and spurious fear”: that inclusivity threatens classical music. “Nobody is mooting that we should ditch Mozart or Mahler,” goes her powerful preface. “I would be the first to fight back if anyone did.” Instead, she questions the “gate-keeping and wall-building” within classical music and how matters of gender, country of birth and class affect ideas of how certain composers have been, and continue to be, appraised.
