On 6 May a composer, who I have no reason to doubt was utterly sincere about his art, died unexpectedly in his sleep at the wretchedly young age of 53. I want this column to ponder the reaction to that death – the muddled platitudes, the collective critical inertia surrounding the puzzling contradictions his work threw up, all of it a troubling reflection upon the culture in which he operated – words that, I fear, are inevitably going to be viewed as a tasteless slight on a worthy man cut down in his prime.

I didn’t know Steve Martland, and encountered him only once in person. All these years later I can still recall that look of contempt stamped all over his face. He’d turned up to the Royal Academy of Music (in 1998? 1999?) at a festival of music by the Italian composer Franco Donatoni, then approaching the end of his own life and visibly frail and tired. Why Martland decided to give Donatoni a piece of his mind I’m not sure, but I was taken aback by the injustice of his words, his lack of sensitivity towards an ailing old man, his failure to grasp the depth and hard-worked-for eloquence of the Donatoni poetic. Something someone said during a pre-concert interview had obviously jangled a nerve and Martland attacked Donatoni’s institutionalised ‘Modernism’, this ‘pointless’ music that nobody wanted to hear, sentiments that rang hollow inside a packed concert hall. And there Donatoni sat looking sad and confused.

Many friends and colleagues, in the aftermath of Martland’s death, testified to his generosity of spirit, the wit and the warmth that belied that severe exterior. After witnessing his bruising, one-sided exchange with Donatoni I had, I admit, demonised Martland. But I never had liked his music. Its posturing surface – his early work happy to stay within the confines of Dutch minimalism as defined by his teacher Louis Andriessen – felt more the point than his run-of-the-mill harmonies and melodic patternings. And his verbal ambush of Donatoni confirmed my hunch that Martland liked nothing better than to rant against a rather ill-defined, nebulous ‘enemy’ that moved outwards from Margaret Thatcher.

In obituaries and appreciations, identikit phraseology pasted over these awkward cracks. Martland was a ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ composer, an ‘iconoclast’, a ‘dissenter’, a warrior who, like it was his religious credo, railed against the superciliousness and elitism of classical music. And if by ‘composer’ you mean the corduroy small-talk of Neo-tonalists like David Matthews or Robin Holloway, or the schooled Modernism of an Alexander Goehr or Simon Holt then, yes indeed, Martland’s abrasive presence must have been disconcerting. He wore punky t-shirts and denims. He said ‘fuck’ in interviews, a rough diamond who relished flicking two fingers towards the urbane academy of classical music.

But no one was prepared to pose any questions about his music. To read these appreciations, you’d think that Martland’s revolutionary zeal remade music from the earth up by day after which he’d disappear into the night and firebomb Simon Rattle concerts.

The reality is a lot more prosaic. Blended seamlessly into those overt references to Andriessen and Stravinsky, his gestural palette hinted at twee French neo-classicism (Milhaud, Poulenc, Françaix). The Steve Martland Band grooved over electric bass and drum kit – which classical critics read as a ‘subversive’ reference to rock music – an instrumentation which was, in fact, imported directly from Andriessen; that his music had any pedigree in, say, The Stooges, PiL, Beefheart or Krautrock was absurd. Martland loathed middle-class affectation. But at the micro-level of notes on the page his music remained obstinately conservative. The revolution lay in the gobby attitude, never inside the notes. Measuring his radical stance against the most conservative music scene around, he willed people to be shocked. And when they inevitably bristled, he took that as an inverted approval. Job done.

Martland’s journey epitomises a recurring trope – musicians who are instinctively suspicious of the preciousness, the requirement to cosy up to the ‘right’ people, but who find it impossible to simply walk away from classical composition and do something else. Security within capture. Classical Stockholm Syndrome. Martland found acceptance as the ‘right’ sort of rebel and, apparently, now is no time to start asking questions why.