This article considers Éliane Radigue and her use of the modular synthesiser, the ARP 2500, as a conduit for musical expression. It examines her seminal work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) and considers current reconnections to her work, including tribute concerts at the Electronic Music Education and Preservation Project, Philadelphia; Kali Malone’s 2022 album, Living Touch, which uses Radigue’s ARP 2500; and the author’s own experience of recording on the machine. As the article points out, these reconnections complement both electronic music compositional methodologies and their future direction. Radigue’s tactile and collaborative approach with the ARP 2500 is an interaction that embodies both the past and future.

This article aims to outline an exploration of the processes of interpretation in electronic music, rooted in my broader engagement with music, technology and performance. The research presented here traverses the boundaries between composition, technology and performance, seeking to understand how these elements interact and inform each other in the practice of electronic music. The article is both a reflection on my past research and a presentation of ongoing explorations, particularly focusing on the interpretation of Éliane Radigue’s Usral (1969). I aim to offer new perspectives on the interpretation of electronic music, highlighting the complexities and opportunities that arise when dealing with non-traditional, often opaque musical tools and methods.

This article sketches an interpretation of Olga Neuwirth’s Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie by focusing on the song by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku in the last section of the composition. This Vocaloid song is disturbing because it expresses a conflicted form of subjectivity that is typical of our time. The article considers four different ways to read this expression: as pop-cultural negation of subjectivity, as postmodern celebration of singularity, as post-revolutionary longing for collectivity or as the contemporary mythical counterpart of the capitalist subject form. I argue that the fourth interpretation seems the most promising. According to this interpretation, Neuwirth stages Hatsune Miku as the sirene of digitalised capitalism – a technological mythos against which the contemporary subjectivity tries to constitute itself.

Two of the most important creative stimuli for Edward Cowie throughout his composing life have been the natural world and working closely with performers, such as the BBC Singers and Kreutzer Quartet. Over the last four years, he and I have been in the studio recording his bird portrait duo cycles, and three geologically themed piano sonatas collectively titled Rock Music. Reflecting on this music and exploring, through my written correspondence with Cowie, how our outlooks align, offers insights into the relationship between music and the environment, particularly when forms and processes with such a rich history as the sonata are in the frame. The gap between the perspectives of performer and composer is also a lens through which salient interpretative matters can be perceived.

This article examines the work of the composer Michelle Lou through its affective and formal mechanisms. I propose that Lou’s work has consistently retained a fundamental and specific orientation towards the listener, which I describe as distance or proximity. In addressing three works spanning eight years – Opening (2008), untitled three-part construction (2014) and HoneyDripper (2016) – I show how the idea of distance informs and is articulated through orchestration, gestural and phrasal construction, scenography and form, and thus frames one’s experience of sound, spatiality, memory, time and perception. While the sounds and materials employed by Lou are often formally cold and sonically abrasive, I argue that her work ultimately implicates and invites the listener in as a crucial element of its sonic ecology, even enacting a sort of phenomenological care over the listener.

This re-evaluation of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is presented as a dialogue between its authors, conducted by email between July and October 2024. The dialogue takes as its starting point a consideration of the continuing relevance of Stockhausen’s music to music today, but begins by tracing the authors’ engagement with this music over the last five decades. The dialogue moves on to the discussion of a series of key aspects of Stockhausen’s work across his creative life, from Kreuzspiel to KLANG: the relationship between his electronic music and his compositional practice for acoustic instruments; form-schemes in his music and, in particular, the development of moment form; and his use of synthesisers. In conclusion, the authors assess Stockhausen’s influence on their own work and the extent of his significance for younger generations of musicians.