Just because I haven't recently been writing here about culture, that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it, and thinking about writing about it. Nevertheless, my hopes of hitting my stride have yet to be fulfilled. I'm still trying to find my voice, and picture my readership.

Part of it is I realise that my cultural tastes are not as elevated as I would like them to be. Even my taste in music depresses me somewhat. For although I love the great canon of classical pieces that everyone else loves (minus most of opera except Mozart, Wagner and Puccini), I simply can't be bothered to listen to most of what is offered now as the latest "classical music", and find myself only echoing Ayn Rand's views on literature. Apparently someone once said to her that her stuff wasn’t exactly in the Mainstream of American Literature and she replied: "The mainstream of American literature is a stagnant swamp."

Last night, via my newly acquired digital TV attachment, I found myself watching and listening to one of last year's Proms, consisting of two works by Oliver Knussen conducted by the man himself. One was called Where The Wild Things Are and the other was called Higglety Pigglety Pop! Physically, Knussen is a very substantial figure, but I am afraid I found the music itself – the idiotic classical-style singing of it especially – utterly risible. Plain embarrassing. Stagnant swamp. And ten times more embarrassing for trying to be funny. There was a whole line of on-purpose badly dressed singers in jumpers and tracksuits all classical-singing away as if their lives depended on it – as I suppose their lives do, poor wretches – grinning idiotically at the "jokes" they were singing so idiotically, and it's a long time since I've seen a group of educated English people look more ridiculous.

If this kind of rehashed Schoenberg is supposed to be the future of classical music, how come a third of the seats were empty, and how come also that about a third of those who were present looked like they were only clapping at the end because they didn't want to hurt the wretchedly massive, sweating, only-fifty-years-old-but-heart-attack-any-year-now Knussen's feelings, and because they knew that TV cameras were present? And why weren't all those present who, like me, despised it all completely, throwing vegetables and waving football rattles and abusive placards? Because it wasn't worth it, is why. This stuff is dead in the water. No need to attack the corpse. Just let it sink.

But now here's my problem. Although the above is my definite opinion of Knussen, were I to be faced by one of those erudite explanations …

Oliver Knussen is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest composers of his generation. He is often labelled a 'minaturist', partly on the basis that he hasn't written many long pieces of music but also because his scores are extremely concentrated - 'every note counts'.

Much of his music is characterised in its construction by the manipulation of small musical cells and, in his mature works, by polyrhythmic musical textures. But that alone doesn't account for the imagination that has produced works like the Fantasy Operas 'Where the Wild Things Are' and 'Higglety, Pigglety Pop!' and settings of texts from Walt Whitman to Winnie-the-Pooh.

… of why I am completely wrong about Kussen's music, and how it will echo down the ages alongside Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and the rest of them, my only answer would be a not very much elaborated version of an old cartoon caption I once saw. A child is facing a plate of gunk which the adults around him are telling him he must eat, because it is good for him. Says he: "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."