Hearing music is easy, listening is much more difficult. It is a rare occasion for us to give complete attention to the sounds which are unfolding around us. Music is most often present in the background, the accompaniment to a different activity. Sometimes, however, this is just not enough. I do not want to rain on people’s good fun, but music is an art and thus demands our respect. Increasingly, however, musical taste is an excuse for prejudice, a means of dismissing whole centuries, genres, and styles of music. Contemporary art music, in particular, suffers from such prejudice. ‘All this modern rubbish’, ‘Schoenberg and that lot’ and ‘horrible noise’ are all wildly inaccurate accounts of contemporary ‘classical’ music, which speak of a widespread misunderstanding.