B was driven by an intense Catholic faith. Famously, he believed that birds had escaped original sin and represented the sound of prelapsarian joy to a fallen world.

The ratio of noise to signal sets modernism apart from all previous cultural eras. The greatest works of art come at us through a hiss of “context”, anecdote, manifesto and commentary. There are the notes to “The Waste Land”; the whole of the “Cantos” which are all quote, note and footnote; the unresolvable question of what Shostakovich really meant; and another composer’s surreal descriptive comments about the imagery and eschatology conjured up in one of the great works of musical modernism Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

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