The simplistic commentator would sometimes have it that, compared to elsewhere in Europe, British music–making between the wars was insular and inward–looking. This is not strictly true; and it very much depended on where you were. While in some quarters there was a strong conviction of the superiority of the British music that had emerged since Elgar, there was also widespread and increasing interest in what was happening on the Continent, as exemplified in the activities of Arthur Bliss, Eugene Goossens and later Constant Lambert and Frank Bridge, and the journalism of Havergal Brian. It was, of course, true that the new composers presented by the Diaghilev ballet attracted a wide following, not only for the brilliance of the ballets themselves but also for their high quality of orchestral performance, at a time when British orchestras were not renowned for their performance standards. Many British composers of the time were also performed abroad, far more than might now be realized, and the new music from Europe was heard in London. Particularly after the inception of the ISCM Festivals in 1922, with British musicians playing a leading role in their organization, an awareness of the latest trends in Europe was widely felt in UK musical circles — though certain idioms, particularly those of the Second Viennese School and some works of Bartók, would not become accepted by the wider public until the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Sir Henry Wood and Sir Adrian Boult, in particular, performed new music in all styles.

Before Schoenberg's Harmonielehre was published in December 1911 by Universal Edition, Vienna, extracts from it were printed in various periodicals, among them the final chapter, ‘Aesthetic Evaluation of Chords with six or more Tones’ in the second June issue of Merker. Besides examples from works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Bartók and Berg, the chapter quotes a passage from ‘a string quartet by my pupil, Anton von Webern’: bar 5 of the first movement of op. 5, composed in 1909 and first performed in February 1910. There are some pointers as to how this quotation came about.

These extensively quoted statements, emanating from two of the most vociferous cultural ideologists of the Third Reich, give the impression that the Nazi regime formulated a highly consistent attitude towards ‘modernist’ trends in contemporary music. In reality, however, perceptions of the exact nature of ‘atonality’ and the ‘atonal’ movement in music remained notoriously imprecise. Six months before Rosenberg's address, for example, Hitler's Propaganda Minister Goebbels had erroneously denounced Hindemith as an ‘atonal musician’ who had succumbed to the ‘biting dissonances of musical bankruptcy’. Similarly, in 1938 Hans Severus Ziegler, organiser of the Degenerate Music Exhibition, had singled out the unequivocally tonal music of Hermann Reutter for particular criticism, claiming that it manifested severe symptoms of constructivism.

The concerto evidently appeals to HK Gruber, as symphonies do not. He has so far written four works that are unambiguously in this form: ‘…aus schatten duft gewebt…’, a concerto for violin and orchestra of 1977–8; the concerto for percussion and orchestra Rough Music (Rauhetöne) of 1982–3; Nebelsteinmusik, for solo violin and string orchestra, of 1988; and the Concerto for Cello and Chamber Orchestra of 1989. Ambiguous examples of the form are his early Concerto for Orchestra (1960–64) – concertos for orchestra are by definition ambiguous – and Frankenstein!!, his ‘pan–demonium’ (rather than ‘concerto’) for baritone chansonnier and orchestra (on children's rhymes by H.C. Artmann), finalized in 1977. Then there are four works which remain in manuscript (withdrawn from circulation): Concerto No. l for flute, vibraphone, xylophone and percussion (1961); Concerto No. 2 for tenor saxophone, double bass and percussion (1961); ‘furbass’ for double bass and orchestra; and an unsatisfactory forerunner of the violin concerto, Arien (1974–5). The symphony he has not touched; and one is tempted to see in this reliance on solo/ensemble confrontation an attempt to hold together the self–splintered, all too globally diversified language of the late 20th century by an eloquent soloist's sheer persuasiveness, by musical force, so to speak, the soloist being dramatized as a kind of Atlas. In the same way Gruber's recourse to popular songs and idioms of ‘light music’ in these works can seem like a desperate attempt to find a tonal prop and sanction for a language so pervasively threatened by tone–deafness and gobbledygook.