An old lady in her late 80s doesn't like dissonant music. It's hardly the most astonishing sentence one could write. Many old people probably share her distaste. But when the old lady in her late 80s is Queen Elizabeth II it's the sort of revelation that sparks interest and debate.

That's especially true when the news comes from the man who holds - though only until he steps down in March - the ancient title Master of the Queen's Music. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - plain Max to the musical world - spills this particular can of royal beans in an interview with the Times today. "It would be foolish not to take on board that the Queen doesn't like dissonant music. She has stated that very plainly," he is reported as saying.

Actually, it's hardly a revelation. It has long been widely inferred - even if not precisely known - that the Queen isn't big on music of any kind at all, so Max's comments that he would be a fool to rub her up the wrong way by composing dissonant music for royal occasions don't change the way we think about the Queen and her hinterland. The truth is that she has never shown any great interest in classical or popular music either.

All this fits with the image that we have of the Queen as essentially an unintellectual person — the image that Alan Bennett so artfully overturned in his book The Uncommon Reader, in which Her Maj suddenly gets an interest in the novel and discovers the world of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Jean Genet. The equivalent would be if she suddenly started turning up unannounced at London Sinfonietta concerts or at the Huddersfield Festival, which as far as I know she never has.

But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Queen is a musical philistine. There's no evidence of that, and she has, from time to time, been exposed to a lot more live music than most people. She may not have fallen in love with what she's heard, but it doesn't necessarily follow that she knows nothing. After all, not all of us have the connection that comes with having someone like Max (and, before him, Malcolm Williamson and Arthur Bliss) whom we appoint to write music for us.

Benjamin Britten was never Master of the QM, but the Queen undoubtedly recognised the stand-out importance in British life of the principal British composer of the postwar era. She is thought to have disliked Britten's Coronation opera Gloriana in 1953 - as many others did too at the time - but it did not deter her from putting the seal of approval on Britten's Aldeburgh festival by opening the Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967 and then returning to reopen it in 1970 after the hall was badly damaged by fire.

The truth, as one would expect from her role in life, is that the Queen is a cultural conservative. So are most of her family, with arguable exceptions like her cousin the Duke of Kent, who is to be seen at chamber music concerts at the Wigmore Hall quite often. Her mother, the Queen Mother, was more musical than her father, and her eldest son, Prince Charles, has Edwardian tastes in music (he made a TV documentary about Hubert Parry) as in most other things. They may not know much about music, but they know what they like and - even more - what they dislike.