The Association for Contemporary Music was initially founded in Moscow in 1923. It united Russian modernist composers, promoted the cause of ‘new music’ in print and in performance, and served as the Russian chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Bowing to political pressure, the Association ceased to operate in the early 1930s. In January 1990, the existence of an Association for Contemporary Music was again announced in Moscow. Despite difficult economic circumstances, it remains active. The following is an interview conducted in July 1993 with one of its founding members and vice-presidents, Nikolai Korndorf.

It was only in the last five years of his life that Markevitch-the-conductor acknowledged and made some amends to his once-celebrated but long forgotten predecessor Markevitch-the composer. Having ignored if not actively suppressed his compositions for some 30 years, he began in 1978 to review them with the mingled delight and anxiety of a prodigal father returning to his offspring after a protracted and neglectful absence. In the intervening years, his cherished friend and onetime teacher Nadia Boulanger had been almost alone among prominent musicians to deplore the disappearance of a major composer, and his supercession by a (mere?) conductor, however brilliant and successful.

Have composers developed a new role in our time? Are creative musicians today, by the gifts given to them, foretelling Armageddon, the musical Nostrodamuses of our day? Does Steve Reich's recent opera The Cave, despite its avowed peaceful message, actually foretell the Hebron massacre of last February? Are the sombre works of the Russian composers Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina predicting events of a similar nature, which are just waiting to be interpreted from the musical sounds to meaningful dialogue?

Would you have been so very angry? But then again I have already offended in this way, or something like it. Hypothetkally Murdered – or Provisionally Dead or whatever you want to call it – I brought back to life as best I could, trying to clothe your sketches and scribbles in the kinds of instrumental colours that I imagined that you might have liked, or at least that you might have recognized. And this was music for a show which, at the time (in 1931), you described as ‘purely disgraceful’.

It is impossible to speak of any composer's harmony, syntax and form without exploring their close linkage. However, on the other hand, it is impossible to understand this close linkage without examining harmony, syntax and form separately.

• Meltdown Festival Mikel Toms, Ian Pace

• The Nightingale and the Rose Malcolm Miller

• Benedict Mason and Playing Away John Warnaby

• Benjamin Lees's Mirrors Bret Johnson

• Brighton Festival 1994 Guy Rickards

• Stephen Paulus's The Veil of Illusion Bret Johnson

• Camille and Claire Robin Freeman

• Post-modernists, Nyman to Mason David Clarke

• Smalley and Swayne Michael Oliver

• Richard Barrett, compositeur maudit manqué Robin Freeman

• Ligeti Concertos Michael Oliver

• Lyatoshinsky and other Russians Martin Anderson

• Luigi Nono Nicolas Hodges

• Nikolai Medtner Martin Anderson

• Faber's Bartk Companion John Pickard

• Grieg-Delius Letters Lewis Foreman

• Poulenc's Letters Martin Anderson

• A Pfitzner Biography Martin Anderson