A leading composer and conductor launched an attack on pop culture last night, saying its overwhelming presence was discouraging young people from making discoveries about music.

A leading composer and conductor launched an attack on pop culture last night, saying its overwhelming presence was discouraging young people from making discoveries about music.

James MacMillan said pop culture had become an "imperialistic force" in society and had reduced the ability of people to sustain concentration and "deep, active" listening.

He quoted a US theologian, who spoke of rock groups who "struggle" to project their individual disaffection and social non-conformity while "endlessly playing" music's three most conventional chords.

"Some may claim that pop culture is harmless. But its ubiquity has become an imperialistic force, edging all else out, a cuckoo in the nest," he told an audience in London.

"The main casualty is the innate curiosity of the young. They are discouraged from making discoveries in music and much else. All they get is what is flung at them through the usual, sanctioned, and controlling media.

"Popular culture, in spite of its protestations of the opposite, seems to curtail and limit natural curiosity, and can lead to uniformity, conformity and narrowness, the very things that pop culture claims to be against."

The 49-year-old Scottish composer was giving a lecture to mark the 30th anniversary of the Sandford St Martin Trust, which presents awards for high quality religious programming.

In his lecture, Mr MacMillan, who is a Roman Catholic, reiterated his attack on "ignorance-fuelled hostility" to religion and spoke of the importance of religious belief in the development of serious music.

He said serious music reached down into the "crevices of the soul" giving a glimpse of something beyond the "horizons of materialism". He said: "Far from being a spent force, religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music and continues to promise much for the future.

"It could even be said that any discussion of modernity's mainstream in music would be incomplete without a serious reflection on the spiritual values, belief and practice at work in composers' minds."