Learning to let go of infuriating experiences is a valuable life skill. Yet in this year of extensive international festivities for the centennial of the English composer Benjamin Britten, I have become annoyed all over again about a conversation I had with some fellow students and junior faculty at the Yale School of Music in the early 1970s, when I was shot down for arguing that Britten’s “Peter Grimes” is a great opera and that Britten was a major composer.

I was having lunch at the pizza place next to the music building. There were mostly composers at the table, if I remember, including a feisty young assistant professor. If my recollection is a little vague, it’s because this type of conversation happened repeatedly during what was a contentious period for contemporary music in America.

The postmodernist backlash had already begun. During my senior year at Yale I was among a group of composers and performers who gave a performance of Terry Riley’s pioneering Minimalist work “In C” before an audience of rapt students in a college dining hall. Yet, while adherence to 12-tone procedures was no longer an absolute, in the music departments of many American universities only pieces written in complex modernist styles were taken seriously.

During that lunch someone made an offhand put-down of Britten. I spoke up for “Peter Grimes,” calling it one of the most astonishing contemporary operas. My remark elicited some condescending titters. But why was Riley’s Minimalism embraced as fascinating, while Britten was deemed a dismissible conservative? His big sin, it appeared, was playing it safe in the middle ground.