Composer Frederick Stocken is no fan of Pierre Boulez. Stocken acknowledges that Boulez was a revolutionary in his younger days, fighting to throw off the repression of tonality. But as the 20th Century progressed, “it was the old story of the revolutionaries becoming as repressive as the masters they had sought to overthrow. In the musical world, the Young Turks became a powerful, “anti-establishment” establishment in which all that was subversive was acceptable and anything deemed traditional was banned. Far from fulfilling its emancipatory promise, atonality became just another dogma, an “official” art. If the parallels between communism and modernism have any truth, how is it that the Marx-influenced aesthetic of Boulez did not collapse with the downfall of communism?” – New Statesman