You are quite right. There is another reason to my mind that it is not one person or one institution to blame for the neglect of composers, but I suspect it goes back a very long way, neither is it fashion - as the latter changes from day to day. No, what composers have suffered over the last 150 years is nothing to do with the above. I would trace it back to Edward Hanslick or even further back to the Schubert period. Look how the composers Delius and Schubert were treated after their deaths. I could name at least two composers who died of AIDS and are neglected now: is this due to a taboo? The history of music is populated with composers who have suffered neglect due to reasons other than their music, which is a shame. Their name and its associations can also play a part. Parry and Stanford are the saddest examples of all, together with George Dyson. Near the end of the 19th century someone noticed a superficial resemblance to Brahms in Stanford's music, and the die was cast. The saddest time was when our own composers were castigated for liking to write melody. The Gibbs generation suffered much from this: John Ireland, Frank Bridge E.J. Moeran, Percy Turnbull, Arthur Somervell, Michael Head, Roger Quilter, Gustav Holst, and Arnold Bax suffered most, with Gibbs, Gordon Jacob, Herbert Howells, Arthur Benjamin, Cyril Scott, and William Lloyd Webber, then later in the last century Gerald Finzi, Alan and Geoffrey Bush, Arnold Cooke, Bernard Stevens, and the film composers Bill Alwyn, Ben Frankel, Malcolm Arnold, Humphrey Searle (a challenging composer if ever there was one) and Wilfred Josephs, at that time all lacking broadcasts because of being successful film composers. The overseas figures too: Paul Hindemith, Honegger, Korngold and Zemlinsky, all suffered neglect for different reasons. In our own time such inspired composers as William Mathias, Tom Eastwood, David Gow, John Joubert, Alun Hoddinot, Kenneth Leighton, Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Elizabeth Maconchy, Anthony Milner and one of the finest, Peter Racine Fricker, spring to mind. Composing simple and utility music was not popular from a concert composer at that time. So Armstrong Gibbs was not a single case, although I have noticed that he does not feature in many reference books.
