In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that ‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period’. Composers should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation.

The re-discovery and recent commercial release, on Regis/Forum, of one of my earliest performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, cannot help but evoke a mood of piquant personal reminiscence. The recording was made in 1967 at Olympic Studios in London, roughly two years after I first became acquainted with this riveting, endlessly compelling and many-layered masterpiece. The mid-1960s were marked by optimism, eager creative responses to the challenge of the new, and a spirit of idealism that is perhaps difficult to recapture in today's more commercially-driven world.

Geoffrey Hill's latest book of poems, Scenes from Comus, borrows its title from Wood's op. 6, and is dedicated to the composer for his seventieth birthday. The two men have been friends for many years and are exact contemporaries: for the poet's seventieth birthday, Wood wrote a vocal-instrumental setting of Hill's Tenebrae. This interchange between poet and musician highlights Wood's abiding concern with poets and poetry, and particularly English verse of the 20th century. He has described this repertoire as ‘a treasure-house, and our poets continue to produce good lyric poetry to this day: it's a waste of being English not to draw on these riches; and the composer has a particular duty to the poets of his own time’. More recently, Jeremy Thurlow has drawn attention to Wood's ‘idiomatic and refined response to English verse: his songs for voice and piano form a considerable part of his oeuvre and must be considered the most distinctive and substantial contribution to British song-writing since Britten and Tippet’.

It was with surprise and delight that, whilst on a research trip to Paris about a year ago, I accidentally discovered a score dating from Henri Dutilleux's Conservatoire period in the 1930s. What I stumbled upon was a song, titled Barque d'Or, written for soprano and piano. Dutilleux's father, Paul Dutilleux, who owned his own printing firm in Douai, published Barque d'Or in 1937. Roger Nichols has quoted Dutilleux's recollection of his father's work:

All that ties in too with the craftsmanship I witnessed in my father's workshop, especially at the bench of one old engraver. We had a great respect for him, he looked like Brahms. On Sundays it was at that bench that my father sat me down to do my harmony exercises, without the piano. During the week my ears were full of the rumbling of the machines, but at those moments the absolute silence seemed to me to have an extraordinary quality — it was a very unusual feeling, which I often think about, and it was a great encouragement to the formation of my inner ear.

When a Western musician thinks of Israel, the immediate association is of incessant political conflict and terrorism, not the country's rich cultural life. Yet, for a state that has endured one terrorist outrage after another over the last four years, Israel's thriving contemporary music scene — a part of classical music events, blossoming with over 2,300 classical concerts a year — is an astounding feat. In March 2002, while biweekly suicide attacks ended the lives of over 120 Israeli civilians, concert halls were unbelievably full despite the fear, or perhaps just because of it, as a constructive escapism. A year later, still under shaky political and economic conditions, Avigail Arnheim, the director of music events at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and Dan Yuhas, the newly-elected chair of the Israel Composers' League (and the music director of the Israel Contemporary Players) initiated preparations for three concurrent festivals of contemporary music in October 2004. A Western musician, not knowing the details, would think that they were planning events for Berlin and Munich audiences, and not for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem listeners.

Aulis Sallinen's symphonies are predictably always compared with those of his compatriot Sibelius. The Cincinnati SO's American première of his latest — the Eighth — in January, just nine months after its world première — Paavo Järvi conducted both performances — hardly made it easy for the listener to shake off such ancestral thoughts, as it was programmed alongside Sibelius's own Fifth. Whereas the Fifth is probably Sibelius's most joyous symphony, Sallinen's, despite initially envisaging an uplifting conclusion, eventually settles for the familiar darkness.

One of the consequences of the extreme paucity of new music broadcasting in Britain is that it is extraordinarily hard to keep up with the output of the major creative talents working in continental Europe. If we leave aside the already-canonical elder figures, only a handful of composers get anything like reasonable coverage (depending on one's definition of ‘reasonable’ — can one new work in four or five really be considered sufficient?). Others seem to have dropped out of listening range altogether. Such is the case with the Romanian-French composer Horatiu Radulescu, now 63 and by any standards one of the most fascinating and individual creative figures of his generation, whose music has been shamefully neglected by the BBC for more years than anyone would care to mention. Besides the usual sorts of prefabricated excuses why this is so (so many composers, so little available broadcast time), one speculates about further reasons. Is Radulescu's music considered simply too weird, too extreme, for Radio 3 listeners? Yes, his pieces are sometimes quite long; yes, they sometimes have strange titles (Capricorn's Nostalgic Crickets; Dizzy Divinity, I; Dr Kai Hong's Diamond Mountain); yes, they are sometimes not easy to digest at one listening. But isn't exposure to the cutting edge of the performing arts one of the things we should reasonably expect from our broadcasting media, especially in the case of a radical artist of such distinction and achievement?

Graham Williams (Welsh-born, in 1940, but long since London-based) is almost as well known as a facilitator of music as a composer in his own right — a pity, because he has things to say which are worth listening to. My first, belated, encounter with his music came in the form of an Elegy for string octet, premièred by the Artea and Pavão Quartets in the Purcell Room in May 2003, a sober and dignified essay in controlled passion, stylistically somewhere between Alban Berg and the Strauss of Metamorphosen. It was the Artea Quartet which was responsible for my next encounter with Williams' music: they gave the première of his Fourth String Quartet in the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, on 21 September 2004 — the three-minute, fourth-movement scherzo trailed four days beforehand in a live performance on In Tune on BBC Radio 3.

The difference that James Levine — finally installed and in control as Music Director — made almost instantly in the Boston Symphony is, to say the least, striking. The orchestra obviously loves working with him, and their contentment even spills over into the concerts when someone other than Levine is conducting; their playing these days is always uniformly wonderful, characterized not just by a concern for accuracy of detail and beauty of sound but also by a palpable pleasure in listening to each other and making music together. As well as changing the general atmosphere, Levine has altered the orientation of the BSO's programming drastically: the amount of 20th- and 21st-century music is greatly increased, but co-ordinated with older standard repertory works in interesting and appealing ways. Not only has the increased amount of newer music not hurt attendance, it seems to have increased interest — certainly among younger people and musicians, who are finding that there are things going on at Symphony Hall that they want to hear.

Paul Wittgenstein's commissioning of concertos for piano left-hand is as enviable a legacy as any performer could wish to have, centred as it is on concertos by Korngold, Franz Schmidt (who also penned for Wittgenstein a set of Concertante Variations on a theme of Beethoven with orchestra and three piano quintets), Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Britten (his op. 21 Diversions) and Ravel. Yet the maimed pianist's quixotic attitude to the works he received is almost as remarkable. Ravel he offended by the liberties he took with the solo part, while Prokofiev's Concerto No. 4 languished unplayed for a quarter of a century, until three years after the composer's death. Yet these cases pale into insignificance compared to the treatment meted out to the concerto that Paul Hindemith wrote for Wittgensein in 1923.

The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group opened their 2004–05 season on 19 September 2004 in typically adventurous, innovatory style with an evening of music — including no less than four world premieres — all centred on Italo Calvino's 1972 book Invisible Cities, in which traveller Marco Polo describes, in imaginary dialogues with Kublai Khan, fifty amazing cities, all of which turn out to be Venice.

1. Purcell Room: Charles Hart

2. Manoukian Cultural Centre, St Yegiche's Armenian Church, Cranley Gardens: Mikhail Pletnev

3. Purcell Room: Roxanna Panufnik

4. Leighton House and The Warehouse: Jonathan Powell, ‘Finland Piano Suomi’

5. Leighton House: Richard Dubugnon's ‘Mikroncerto III’

BENJAMIN: Palimpsests; At First Light; Sudden Time; Olicantus. Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Modern Orchestra, c. George Benjamin, Oliver Knussen. Nimbus NI 5732.

PETRASSI: Concertos for Orchestra Nos. 1–8. Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra c. Arturo Tamayo. Stradivarius STR 33700 (2-CD set).

JOHN ADAMS: On the Transmigration of Souls. New York Choral Artists, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, New York Philharmonic c. Lorin Maazel. Nonesuch 7559 79816 2.

EGON WELLESZ: Vorfrühling; Leben, Traum und Tod; Lied der Welt; Sonette der Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Ode an die Musik; Vision; Symphonischer Epilog. Regina Klepper (sop), Sophie Koch (mezzo), Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, c. Roger Epple. Capriccio 67077.

WELLESZ: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 8; Symphonischer Epilog. Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, c. Gottfried Rabl. CPO 999998-2.

WELLESZ: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 9. Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, c. Gottfried Rabl. CPO 999997-2.

WELLESZ: Prosperos Beschwörungen; HONEGGER: Symphony No. 5; STRAVINSKY: Le Sacre du printemps; JANÁČEK: Sinfonietta; WEBERN: Passacaglia; Six Movements op. 6; BERG: Der Wein; SCHOENBERG: Pelleas und Melisande; SCHMIDT: Symphony No. 2. Vienna Philharmonic c. Haitink, Ansermet, Markevitch, Kubelik, Mehta, Dorov, Bohm, Leinsdorf. Andante AND4080.