It will be very disappointing if the 400th birthday of baroque composer Barbara Strozzi is not suitably remembered

Just as 2018 saw misty-eyed reminiscence about The Beatles’ White Album, this year will be all about Abbey Road

IF there is one thing that dates pop music as we cruise deeper into the 21st century – top down, radio up – it is the prevalence of anniversary celebrations. Music made for young people thus occupies the same sphere as the classical, with its full-fat diet of regular anniversary concerts.

We might speculate why this is not true of other genres of music. Although reissue programmes are part of jazz, focus on the creation of a particular album is rare, with the crossover popularity of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis one obvious example.

I’d like to think that is because jazz is about breaking new ground, being all about improvisation. And traditional music – perhaps as a consequence of its essential debt to what has gone before – seems to take a broader view than an obsession with birthdays.

It is safe to bet, however, that this year, as in the rest of the decade, “heritage” acts will be back in venues

they could not have hoped to fill after their first flush of fame, peddling recreations of their one successful album 20 or 30 years on, having mastered a setlist they probably never played back then.

And just as 2018 saw misty-eyed reminiscence about The Beatles’ White Album 50 years after its release, this year will be all about Abbey Road. It didn’t actually appear until the end of September in 1969, but Glasgow’s Celtic Connections is early out of the blocks on that one when Roddy Hart’s annual Roaming Roots Review concert at the festival teams his band the Lonesome Fire with an array of guest artists to explore the album on January 20. Celtic Connections also has a couple of concerts with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that celebrate the work of Scottish film composer Patrick Doyle in his 65th birthday year, with a live soundtrack to a screening of Disney’s Brave a week today and a portrait concert at the City Halls six days later.

The 60th birthday of Sir James MacMillan is not until the summer, but it is also getting big licks imminently, with a performance of his new

Trombone Concerto by the SSO on Thursday and then the man himself conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in two of his masterpieces from the 1990s, Veni, Veni, Emmanual and Seven Last Words from the Cross towards the end of February. Celebrations of living talents is a fine thing, and our orchestras are also expert at honouring the dead. One of the big classical anniversaries of the year is the 150th of the death of Hector Berlioz and the SCO and its featured artist this season, soprano Carolyn Sampson, perform his Les Nuits d’Ete at the end of this month and then Symphony Fantastique to close the season in May. The SSO have an all-Berlioz programme in mid-February which includes mezzo Karen Cargill singing La Mort de Cleopatre and Edinburgh Festival Chorus his romantic music drama Lelio.

There are other significant birthdays to look out for. It will be very disappointing if the 400th of Venetian baroque composer Barbara Strozzi, a composer of distinction in the 17th century, is not suitably remembered and the 200th birthday of Jacques Offenbach also should not be allowed to pass, even if his music is perhaps not so fashionable.

But revisiting the pop music of just 50 years ago?

That looks like a symptom of a lack of musical excitement now, however enjoyable the Abbey Road concert is.

The great theorist and philosopher Theodor Adorno, who died in 1969, had a great deal to say about music. I wonder what he would think about the stasis in pop now? Serge Gainsbourg called 1969 “l’annee erotique” and had a banned hit with Je t’aime.

There were just five months between the triumph of Woodstock and the disaster of Altamont that year. It is impossible to imagine 2019 producing anything like such an adrenalin rush.