Every lecture of mine at Gresham has dwelt upon the ways in which the position of music in our society is different from that of earlier societies. For a start, we now listen to their music a lot more than we do to our own, something that would have astonished earlier listeners. That preponderance of old music and the loss of mass ownership of what is new are, in part, because some of what we hear for the first time is not much good; worse, because some of the least durable stuff gains the highest exposure, the public perception of what is 'new music' in the classical stream is often shaped by an unrepresentative sample.