SCARPIA / The re-invention of tradition: The past catches up with contemporary composers at the Bath, Malvern and Newbury festivals

THE PAST, L P Hartley warned, is a foreign country: 'they do things differently there'. But as a tourist destination it has never been more popular. In literary circles a common grumble is that modern novel-writing is too often parasitic by nature: that it derives its strength by feeding off the great achievements of other ages - think of Flaubert's Parrot or Emma Tennant's recent Tess. And the effects of 'heritage' thinking could be seen in each one of the towns I drove through on my weekend festival anabasis: shopping centres with gables and colonnades, car parks with portcullises . . .

But any inclination I may have to make a blanket dismissal of the whole phenomenon runs up against one solid obstacle: the work in Saturday's Bath Festival concert that left by far the strongest impression - with the exception of the Schumann song-cycle, Liederkreis, on which it is based - was Robin Holloway's past-steeped Fantasy Pieces.

Superficially, this belongs to that crowded genre of 'now you see it, now you don't' pieces in which an acknowledged masterwork is continually present, but never quite emerges centre-stage. In many cases, the response to this kind of thing is a devout wish that the 'living' composer would shut up and let the 'dead' one speak. But, despite the choice of one of the loveliest of all 19th-century romantic song-cycles as its starting-point - heard in its entirety after Holloway's short, harsh introduction - Fantasy Pieces develops into an unusually stirring experience in its own right, especially in the aptly- named final section, 'Roses - thorns and flowers'. Schumann's ideal sweetness and Holloway's barbed modernism intertwine and struggle with one another, and the outcome is a major triad that in the Nash Ensemble's fine performance managed to sound both warm and deeply uncertain at the same time.

Together, Schumann and Schumann-Holloway put everything else in the programme into rather cold perspective. However much we music critics may enjoy examining the technical facets or the ideas- content - real or imagined - of a new work, for the vast majority of music-lovers such territory is completely inaccessible. In fact, it is only when the music physically charms or excites them that the ideas begin to have any interest at all. For my companion, very much a musical amateur, Knussen's Songs without voices, Turnage's Horn Trio, At close of day, and Holloway's own Summer Music were unengaging, and therefore closed books. The disturbing thing for me, the professional critic, was that at heart I agreed. I could fill pages examining each piece, and in positive terms too; and yet, if I'm honest, Fantasy Pieces was the only one I'd actually look forward to hearing again. The temptation for critics is to write as though, in music, 'interesting' were enough. It isn't.

So what of the other new works aired this weekend? Matthew Taylor, a young composer featured at the Malvern Festival, has already acquired a reputation in some quarters as something of a musical young fogy. When he calls a piece Piano Concerto, no irony is intended. Like Robert Simpson, whom he greatly admires, Taylor composes as though communication lines with the past have not been broken - and not just the concerto's 'great' past, but the recent-ish past too; there were hints of the Tippett piano concerto, and echoes from somewhere in the region of Rawsthorne. As another Simpson admirer, I should say that I found the Concerto most impressive when it sounded least like Simpson, especially the slow movement, with its memorable piano motifs and warmly aspiring string lines. Evidently, this is a composer who has the ability to be more than interesting.

So, too, is Diana Burrell. Unlike Holloway, who can make musical capital out of historical self-consciousness, and unlike Taylor, who still seems to be finding himself in relation to a powerfully experienced tradition, Burrell at her best just is Burrell - take it or leave it. Her new work at the Newbury Festival, Resurrection, evoked no genres or past greats, but drew its strength from an archetype - the death and rebirth of the 'victim', mirroring progress from winter to spring.

The cor anglais played the part of the victim clearly enough, the moment of the kill was obvious, and so - seconds later - was the significance of the 'frozen' string chord - the ice now begins to melt. The clarity of the narrative, and the energy in the writing, were a reminder of something else music does rather well - tell stories in terms more fundamental and conceptually uncluttered than any written text can match.

'From the heart, let it go again to the heart,' wrote Beethoven over the score of his Missa Solemnis. It's too easy to suggest that such essential directness was all right for him, in that foreign country of the past, and to forget that without it, music is lost.