In 1999, both Hugh Wood and Alexander Goehr retired from Cambridge University. Goehrfest, a short festival put on to mark this occasion, featured performances of works by both composers (and others associated with the university), but for the most part, as the name suggests, it was Goehr's departure that generated the greater amount of retrospective stock-taking and speculation about the future. Indeed, the focus on Goehr was not surprising, for in comparison Hugh Wood's output and influence have to date been more modest. Nevertheless, the time is long overdue for a critical (re)assessment of Wood's music, which has demonstrated throughout his career an enduring concern with both directness of communication and the upholding of a core set of aesthetic and technical values.

Of all the different ingredients that combine to make up a musical performance, it often seems that the one which reveals most, and most extreme, variation is – tempo. Subject as it is also to various non-musical factors – such as acoustics; size of the locale; technical or instrumental limitations – as well as to other somewhat equally subjective conditions such as taste; historical or supposed authenticity; even fashion – this is hardly surprising. Maelzel's invention of his metronome almost two centuries ago has not necessarily succeeded in bringing order into chaos; it is notoriously difficult to set this device to give an incontrovertibly accurate answer to every question. (It is also known that some composers have possessed a metronome which, apparently being mechanically unsound, has raised more questions than it has answered.)

Gerard Schurmann was born of Dutch parents in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, but spent more than 40 years, including the most formative period of his musical life, in England before moving to the US in 1981. Even during his years in the Netherlands as orchestral conductor with the Dutch Radio in his early twenties, he maintained an apartment in London, sometimes commuting to his place of work in Hilversum. His experience was similar to Bernard van Dieren, another Dutch-born composer who lived in England, although not for as many years as Schurmann: Holland has made no particular move to claim either as a Dutch composer. It was in England that Schurmann developed his skills and persona as a musician, after arriving as a teenager in 1941.

Just as a young grand master chooses, with a degree of self-acknowledgement, an opening that creates space for key playing strengths at a later stage, Jörg Widmann seems with every new work to alight on an initial strategy (usually in the form of just a single sound or a complex but discrete sonic entity) which not only occasions further related ideas in the composer's imagination but also reveals feasible compositional paths through the new material. In performance, this simultaneity of creation – in which the primary gesture is clearly a microcosm of the piece itself – may be perceived too in real time by the audience. Any closer analogy with the game of chess breaks down at this point: Widmann's openings remain ambiguous, marked by both a tentative approach and moved by a desire for more telling blows to render a score complete. Music – or the calling to write it, at least – remains nonetheless a considerable opponent. And the sense of the composer finding his bearings at the outset (one might say the onset) of a piece is palpable. A febrile tension is created.

Adriana Hölszky – Romanian-born, but Stuttgart-based since 1976 – scored a deserved, significant hit when her first opera, Bremer Freiheit, based on Rainer Maria Faessbinder, was staged at the 1988 Munich Biennale. Two other operas – one based on Jean Genet – had their premières in Vienna and Bonn, before Stuttgart's ever-pioneering Württembergisches Landestheater commissioned Giuseppe e Silvia, based on Hans Neuenfels, in 2000. A sheaf of chamber and orchestral works have seen premières at festivals such as Styria and Vienna, and (even more aptly) at Donaueschingen.

Among major European festivals, the Lucerne Festival is outstanding in the attention it pays to contemporary music. The latest manifestation of this is the founding of an annual Lucerne Festival Academy for young professional players, specializing in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, under the leadership of Ensemble Intercontemporain and the indefatigable Pierre Boulez. Nor is this is on the modest scale of a ‘young Sinfonietta’: its final concert, conducted by Boulez, began with Harrison Birtwistle's massive Earth Dances.

The Balkans' Summer Music Camp was first established in 1995. Nigel Osborne's initiative was to address the needs of children who had been victims of trauma caught in conflict and warlocked zones in the former Yugoslavia. Through a professional exchange with Nigel Osborne last year at the Cambridge Music Conference, my sister Catherine Carmack (12.10.57–12.12.03) decided to work as a volunteer at the camp this summer. Owing to her untimely death I went in her place, to observe the creative and curative process of the children's development. About 35 children from the Special School of Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina came to the Adriatic for a week's vacation on the coast of Croatia. Most of these children live in an orphanage in Mostar, but are receiving music therapy through the Pavarotti Music Centre. Although most of the children were attended by carers, a few of the children were accompanied by their mothers. Many of the children are primarily suffering from exposure to violence and remain traumatized. Some of them have special needs including Down's Syndrome; two were marginally disabled with cerebral palsy.

The fortnight-long celebration Omaggio to the late Luciano Berio, held 15–30 April 2004, explored the post-modern passion and exuberance of the composer's musical personality, from the experimental daring and fun of the era of new music of the 1960s to the more searching multi-cultural tapestries of the final decades and his last works. Large audiences drawn from all ages enjoyed a wide range of Berio's works at the South Bank Centre and the Royal Academy of Music, including several UK premières including Stanze, his last work, as well as seminal pieces such as Sinfonia, Laborintus II, the fourteen Sequenzas, and electronic music, performed by leading virtuosi and ensembles. Overall, the festival represented a significant and memorable tribute to one of the leading figures of new music in the second half of the 20th century.

The Presteigne Festival in the 21st century is in many ways the natural successor to the post-war years of the Cheltenham Festival, not just in its enlightened choice of first-rate contemporary British music, but in its cultivation of ‘house composers’ who can be spotted browsing in local shops as well as providing the focus of several informal pre-concert talks. In fact, the music of three composers who received their first big commissions from the Cheltenham Festival – William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott and John McCabe – were all celebrated at the 2004 Presteigne Festival.

Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the third opera in John Adams's trilogy, Doctor Atomic, seems set fair to juxtapose modern political forces, personalities and moral debate. Here admiration for Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow geniuses who created the atomic bomb is contrasted with the enormity of destruction wreaked on Hiroshima. With over a year to go to the opera's world première by San Francisco Opera, the composer himself conducted Easter Eve 1945, the opening of Act 2, at the Albert Hall on 22 August with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Audra McDonald as soloist.

In fulfillment of a commission from the BBC for a work in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the BBC Symphony Chorus, Mark-Anthony Turnage produced Calmo, an untypically quiet and gentle work for chorus with handbells – and, what has become something of a signature instrument for him, desk bells. The text of the work consists of the words ‘Dona nobis pacem’ and their translations in several languages. It is dedicated to the memory of Turnage's friend Sue Knussen. Calmo's intense eloquence was enhanced by its brevity, and, both despite and because of it, stood out in a program of music for chorus, harp, and organ by an assortment of older and newer Czech and British Composers, including Janáček, MacMillan, Holst, and Eben, presented by the BBC Symphony Chorus, conducted by Stephen Jackson.

The Immortal by the Chinese-American Zhou Long (b. 1953) – commissioned by the BBC World Service (apparently its first-even Proms commission) and premièred by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its out-going chief conductor, Leonard Slatkin, on 20 July – is a tribute ‘to the influence of Chinese artists and intellectuals in the twentieth century’, as the composer notes in the score. He adds: ‘Having grown up in an artistic family during the time of the Cultural Revolution, I know from personal experience the struggles and hardships that past generations have endured to remain true to these eternal ideals’. Past generations? Zhou himself was sent to labour in the fields; a back injury had him re-allocated to a song-and-dance troupe, where he encountered notionally prohibited western instruments among the Chinese ones – a stylistic integration he maintains even when writing exclusively for the modern symphony orchestra.

Commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival and performed there for the first time on 13 August by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins, these variations on Vaughan Williams's hymn tune ‘Down Ampney’ (so named after the village of the composer's birth), were surprising individual successes. The overall shape of the work, arch-like with a slow-fast-slow-fast-slow structure, was suggested by John McCabe, celebrating his 65th birthday year and featured composer at this year's Three Choirs. McCabe, joined in this collaborative effort by Robert Saxton, James Francis Brown, David Matthews and Judith Bingham, also sensibly requested that the orchestration be limited to double woodwind, modest brass and percussion sections, harp and the usual strings.

‘I haven't heard my piece yet, none of us have’, confided thirtysomething composer Will Todd as he arrived to take his place in the audience at the Purcell Room on 13 July. He spoke as one of the twenty British composers, all alive and well, commissioned by artists Alison Smart (soprano) and Katharine Durran (piano) to set a French poem for them to perform. Unusually, the composers had to submit their scores as if ‘tablets from on high’, without rehearsal input. Although this worked well as they all entered into the spirit, and the artists seemed particularly adept at interpretation over a wide range of genres – from Graham Fitkin's mimimalist-style ‘Les Aliments Blancs’ (Satie: ‘je ne mange que des aliments blancs’), to John Casken's impressionistic ‘Colloque Sentimental’, with its shades of Debussy – having such a swift succession of 20 short ‘soundbites’ made for a rather over intense programme overall. Perhaps, on another occasion, a concentration on no more than ten composers, would allow for rehearsal time with each to assist in conveying more in-depth interpretation of the text, and give the audience more time to absorb each contribution.

It has been three years since the last Hugh Wood première (his Fifth String Quartet), and in that time his music has disgracefully become an endangered species – practically extinct – in concert programmes. Therefore, his Cantilena and Fugue op. 47, given its first performance on 7 July as part of the City of London Festival, was doubly welcome. And, as if to compensate for the wait, a second new work followed just two days later, with the première of Wood's Tribute to Michael Berkeley, one of 20 short works commissioned to mark Berkeley's final year as artistic director of the Cheltenham Festival.

1. Conway Hall: Ronald Stevenson's Bax Variations

2. Barbican: Poul Ruders' ‘Listening Earth’

3. Conway Hall again: Gerard Schurmann's String Quartet