An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Thea Musgrave’s 1981 radio opera, sounds like a 12-tone revival of Bonanza being interpreted by the cast and crew of The Archers. Based on an Ambrose Bierce short story about the American Civil War, the opera could, in fact, only have emerged from an early 1980s BBC radio studio. When characters walk around, I don’t, as Musgrave hopes, picture “visual imagery”, but see a sound-effects man plodding in a tray of pebbles, clutching his script earnestly; when, at 2'45", the arrival of a soldier is heralded with a pre-recorded tape of horse’s hooves and neighing, you begin to wonder whether The Goon Show and Samuel Beckett’s radio plays were in vain.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is terrible, even more heinous than Roberto Gerhard’s not dissimilar The Plague, because at least Gerhard was wise to the problem of losing his compositional identity inside the plot. Although enticing lyricism occasionally asserts itself – “I can feel the sand, like diamonds” even has a hint of the Sondheims – too much of Musgrave’s music is “incidental” in the worst possible sense: chords have no function other than as scene-setting prompts; dialogue is underpinned with pointless ostinatos. And that no one shows much awareness of how ridiculous the caricatured American accents sound, or what a twee and hollow response this is to Bierce’s text, is unforgivable.

Wild Winter I (1993), scored for voices and viol ensemble, knits poetry and music together with greater synergy; but Green for 12 strings (2007) sets tonalities against each other and has something of Occurrence’s contrived drama. Is it a coincidence that one section climaxes with the DSCH motif pinballing around the ensemble?