Why no Rebecca Saunders? It is a question I have asked myself repeatedly over the last five or six years when August comes round again. For some reason – don’t ask me why – I hold the opinion that, in seeking to support the foremost British composers, the Proms should, perhaps, commission one of the foremost British composers. 

Yet, according to their own archive, only one solitary Saunders work has even been performed at the Proms, while the commissioners have overlooked her entirely.

This continues to be the case, even though there was a focus on her work at Huddersfield in 2010, she received an RPS award in 2012 and won a British Composer Award in 2014. Radio 3 was even involved in commissioning her violin concerto, Still. With such events, ignorance of her work can no longer be an excuse, unless these commissioners have stopped engaging with new music all together – an impression that some of their commissioning history does little to dispel.

The fact that makes this absence of Saunders’ work most strange, infuriating, and baffling, is that the Proms is – rightly (and I can’t stress that enough) – supporting living composers who happen to be female. Hooray! Tremendous. Good. 

But why then ignore one of the most experienced, internationally acclaimed and, to me, interesting composers the UK has produced of late? Even a blindfolded monkey pointing at random composer mug shots on the internet would have unwound a long, intelligent digit in her direction by now. (Before then throwing shit all over Brian Ferneyhough - these are Proms monkeys after all).

I will give them the benefit of the doubt that this lack of interest in her work is not because of Saunders’ long-term residency in Berlin – if the arts world is suffering from such an attitude then these are petty times indeed. Rather, it appears that her work contradicting another of the Proms’ core values – though this one is not stated with quite the same verve as their support for women composers.

A clue to what this might be, is found in a puff piece I had the misfortune of reading recently on the BBC website advertising 6 composers who were to feature in the Proms.  Here are some choice extracts:

- (On Lera Auerbach) ‘Her compositions are full of musical imagination without straying too far from traditional forms and tonalities – a quality that has helped her become lauded in the States.  This is music to get carried away with, rather than to dryly appreciate…’

- ‘Sally Beamish is a composer unafraid of a luscious melody. She eschews the obsession with hardcore modernism of her college contemporaries, but there’s nothing backward-looking or staid about her scores…’

- ‘Knowing Emily Howard is a maths and computing graduate and six-times former junior chess champ, you might expect dry logic and perplexing complexity from her music. Not so. In fact, it’s playful, dramatic, surprising, cinematic and intense.’

I’ve got no beef at all with these individuals, and the composers themselves might cringe a little at this wide-eyed, enthusiastic support. Yet, it does betray the Proms’ chief fear when it comes to new music, one which they consider it their mission to alleviate: the fear that everyone thinks new music is dull, stale and academic. 

Modernism, in other words, is out – thank God! – and music can return to luscious melodies and to being playful, dramatic, surprising, cinematic, intense, dynamic, funky, barnstorming, tripping, glitchy, banging, tasty, erotic, salty, chewy, effervescent, ineluctable, aforesaid, upside-down, glowing, trumpet, barn, donkey, Gandalf, Roger Penrose, presumptuous, pre-Raphaelite etc.

The position has a number of contradictions, of course. Not least that the Proms was never a centre of the sort of plinky-plonky, stern-faced, square-paper modernist music they imagine. Nowhere really was: not even in Darmstadt, long considered the bastion of such an approach, were such works in the majority. 

In their support for the happy-go-lucky, sunny side of modernism, as well as music with stronger ties to tradition, the Proms is in fact very much continuing the work it has been doing for decades. The modernist past against which they construct their shining new dawn is a mirage. A further contradiction lies in the fact that a number of the composers mentioned in this article take inspiration from the very same modernist tradition from which the BBC are attempting to distance them.

Saunders, it seems, in her really rather mild reimagining of this tradition, is suffering from this secret fear at the heart of Proms programming. The German-inspired focus on Klang appears to put her on the wrong side of the modernist curtain. In this, the Proms’ pro-equality stance has similar blind spots to their work supporting the primarily male composers they have worked with over the years: a fear of presupposed difficulty on behalf of the listeners.

Don’t worry BBC, they’ll be fine. Saunders is an important compositional voice that deserves to be heard in this country. Give her a commission, perform her music. Not because she needs it to survive, but because you should be faithful to the variety of British creativity.

Ignoring her is increasingly becoming a sign of an introverted and ignorant commissioning system.

By all means, prove me wrong.