Michael Nyman, CBE? Who saw that coming? For anyone who has followed Nyman’s sorry trajectory from a once promising alternative voice within the tepid British new-music mainstream to the composer of the star-struck football-inspired Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, his elevation to Commander of the Order of a British Empire that no longer exists will come as no surprise. You might as well jump into bed with the real thing if you’re going to write paeans to our celebrity pretend royal family. Nyman — the loneliest man in British contemporary music — has finally got the acceptance he craves. Pity it’s not from anybody interested in music.

Nyman is the latest in a long line of one-time militant British composers who have been unable to resist this hollow pat-on-the-back. Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle have all stood in front of the Queen to accept their honours, having presumably wrestled with their consciences and found therein that failsafe get-out: they are accepting on behalf of their colleagues as well as themselves. Anyway, to turn down an honour is to deny contemporary music a brief moment in a generally uninterested spotlight.

But, by definition, the hand of the Establishment, and Government, has never been willing to feed radical music in this country, and was made decidedly uncomfortable when a list of refuseniks, leaked in 2003, was revealed as being more impressive than those who had accepted. For reasons of political allegiance, sexuality or class, Tippett, Britten and Birtwistle were instinctive outsiders who expressed another view of what it is to be British. Tippett, who served time at Her Majesty’s pleasure as a conscientious objector, created music that defiantly “unstiffened” the British lip: his work was motivated by left-wing idealism, was inclusive and not a bit kinky.

To what degree a nod from the Palace impinges on the substance of a composer’s work is an open question. Tippett couldn’t have composed a dull piece if he tried, and although Birtwistle’s latest opera, The Minotaur, is much cuddlier than an earlier masterpiece such as The Mask of Orpheus, it should never be forgotten that he was the man who socked it to Daily Mail England at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995 with his mutinous saxophone concerto Panic.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that idiosyncratic and individualist one-offs are routinely sucked into the anachronistic standardisation of our honours system. Honours and royalty — and all their deference, protocol and tradition — is everything that probing art fights against. To comment on a culture you ought to remain outside it, not accept prizes for keeping your nose clean.

Nyman’s CBE was announced shortly after a dedicated festival of his work at the Cadogan Hall in Chelsea proved disastrous at the box office, even after he issued a barrage of increasingly desperate press releases hooking new pieces around worthy causes. A few weeks earlier the great Humphrey Lyttelton, who came from an aristocratic family, went to his grave without title, having turned down an honour from John Major’s Government. Lyttelton liked the motto “Unto thine own self be true”, carved above the stage of the Conway Hall in London, the venue of his legendary Humph at the Conway album. He wanted to be judged on his work. Memories of Lyttelton gigs once enjoyed, or listening to his legacy on record? Now that is an honour.

- Philip Clark is a composer and contributor to Wire and Gramophone

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