SERIOUS music could become “extinct” in Britain, the Master of the Queen’s Music believes.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, 70, who took up the 380-year-old post last year, attacked government cutbacks in music education and lamented an assumption by the vast majority of people that classical music was elitist.

Delivering the Royal Philharmonic Society Annual Lecture at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, his first major public speech since his appointment, Sir Peter said yesterday that masterpieces such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion were now seen as “the exclusive domain of the elderly”. There was an inverted snobbery about cultural standards, he said.

Pop music had played its part in “drugging” constructive, creative thinking, sometimes offering texts that were “even more right-wing than our more extreme politicians”.

Sir Peter, who lives in the Orkney Islands and describes himself as a “working-class boy from Salford”, has written hundreds of works, including operas, ballets and symphonies.

He recalled that by the 1960s and 1970s Britain had a healthy amateur choral tradition and “decent” music education in schools, ensuring that many young people could read a line of music competently. Today, most could not name Britain’s most celebrated composer, Purcell, he said. He blamed successive governments for cutting back on music education to the extent that “few teachers read or write musical notation” .

“Can we imagine the teaching of English in circumstances where the teacher not only does not know any poems, novels or plays, but cannot read?”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Donor organ allowed child’s own heart to heal
• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Sacha Baron Cohen forced to tone down Brüno