The music, like its composer, plays a game of hide and seek. But it does so in broad daylight. Robin Holloway's music is not always quoting others – although it quotes more, and more covertly, than many of his own published statements might lead one to believe – but quotation has become such a compulsive game for Holloway that it is often hard to say where ‘he’ stops or where ‘others’ begin. Whereas the composer's own public confessions have tended to focus on the extent to which his music adopts the voices and personas of others, it seems to the current writer that Holloway's own voice – its harmonic and textural mannerisms, preferences in structure and in subject matter, ways of relating notes to ideas and images – remains characteristic and recognizable throughout. It is the implications of this fact that I wish to explore in this brief survey.

There is a widespread perception that music and architecture are profoundly dissimilar, far removed from each other in the creative spectrum. While music is regarded as ephemeral, transient, involving vibration, pitch and time – you hear it, you feel it, its beauty is assigned to your memory – the general response to architecture is fundamentally different. Those homogeneous, concrete volumes and solid, three-dimensional forms are thought to occupy a permanent, static and unyielding part of our environment, a constant reminder of its unique presence in time, unrelated to any other art-form. Architecture just does not float away into space like music – as some might fervently wish! But music and architecture cannot possibly exist independently in hermetically sealed compartments – they are inexorably bonded together by their very nature and by the cultural history that surrounds them.

Last September Dr Arthur Wills OBE celebrated his 80th birthday by publishing his memoirs Full With Wills and enjoying a host of performances of some of his works. Now living in retirement in Ely, within sight of the great Cathedral whose musical life he developed and directed for over 40 years, he spoke to me at length in May this year about his life in music: as organist, choir director, composer, academic and educator.

One of the most striking features in the music of the British composer Michael Nyman (born 1944) is the emphatic presence of musical quotations. This may be all the more remarkable because the main influence on Nyman's compositional style is minimal music. Generally, American minimal music is characterized by a large degree of abstraction, focussing on absolute music, clear abstract structures and the gradual unfolding of systematic musical processes. The almost provocatively objective appearance of the titles of works by Steve Reich (Violin Phase, Four Organs, Music for 18 Musicians) may be seen as emblematic for a music in which the transparent, process-like transformation of limited musical material calls for an equally objective type of material. Although American minimalists such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass take recourse to diatonic material and tonal or modal harmonies, any reference to specific historical models is almost unconceivable in their early work, as the associations that come with the quoted material would only distract the listener from the systematic processes that the material is being subjected to, which forms the essence of this style. In that respect, Michael Nyman's fusion of minimalist strictness with openly acknowledged borrowings of pre-existing music sets him apart from his American contemporaries. This article investigates how Nyman applies different aspects of his quotation technique, how he incorporates the musical and extra-musical characteristics and associations that come with the quoted material into a solid musical statement, and how all this is combined with the strictness of his minimalism-related composition technique.

• Manchester International Festival Tim Mottershead

• Zagreb: 24th Music Biennale Donata Premeru

• Amsterdam, Nederlands Opera: John Adams and Jonathan Harvey Malcolm Miller

• New York and Boston: Nico Muhly Rodney Lister

• Birmingham: Tansy Davies Paul Conway

• Manchester and London: Bainbridge and Meredith John Wheatley

• Additional reviews by Malcolm Miller, Paul Conway, Jill Barlow

• Recent Adorno publications Ian Pace

• Prokofiev's Diaries 1907–1914 Martin Anderson

• Boosey & Hawkes: The Publishing Story Malcolm Gillies

• Cage Talk Clemens Gresser

• Panufnik the Symphonist Paul Conway

• ‘Moonstruck’ – F. G. Scott Songs Calum MacDonald

• Stephen Dodgson & Nicholas Maw Quartets Peter Palmer

• John McCabe, British Viola Music Paul Conway

• Howard Hanson's ‘Merry Mount’ Bret Johnson

• Othmar Schoeck Peter Palmer

• Dallapiccola Tim Mottershead

• Richard Arnell Paul Conway

• Seriously Sibelius Guy Rickards

• Sadie Harrison Jill Barlow

• Additional reviews by Peter Palmer, Paul Conway, Martin Anderson