The winner of the 2016 Turner Prize, the UK's most widely publicised prize for visual artists, is Helen Martens; earlier in the year she also won the Hepworth Prize. On both occasions she announced that she would share her prize money with her fellow nominees, a generous yet provocative gesture. It's good to share, of course, but isn't the point of prizes that someone should win? And if the prizewinner is selected from a group of possible prizewinners who are themselves selected from the much larger pool of all those eligible why not share the prize with everyone?

Linda Catlin Smith was born in 1957 and grew up in New York. She studied composition in New York and at the University of Victoria, before settling in Toronto in 1981. Linda has received Canada's prestigious Jules Léger prize for her work Garland (2005). She was the Artistic Director of Toronto's contemporary ensemble Arraymusic (1988–93), and a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective Urge (1992–2006). She currently teaches composition at Wilfrid Laurier University. I sat down with Linda in the summer of 2016 at her home in the Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood of Toronto to ask her about her life and work.

Thomas Adès's third opera, The Exterminating Angel, is based closely upon Luis Buñuel's 1962 film El ángel exterminador, in which the hosts and guests at a high-society dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the dining room. Initial critical response to the opera too often focused on superficial similarities and discrepancies between the two works at the expense of attending to the specifically musical ways in which Adès presented the drama. This article explores the role that repetition plays in the opera, and in particular how repetitions serve both as a means of critiquing bourgeois sensibilities and as a representation of (loss of) will. I conclude by drawing on the work of Deleuze in order to situate the climax of the opera against the notion of the eternal return, highlighting how the music articulates the dramatic failure of the characters to escape.

Features of Michael Finnissy's music are considered through some of the ideas and writings of anthropologist Tim Ingold. Finnissy and Ingold share a preoccupation with line and, more specifically, exploring Finnissy's compositional approach as applied anthropology provides productive insights into his music and performance practice. The starting point for this investigation is a consideration of three of Finnissy's pieces connected to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Completion of the Requiem KV 626 by W.A. Mozart and F.X. Süssmayr (2011); Cibavit eos (1991); and WAM (1990–91). These pieces provide a convenient set of examples with relevant features: music that connects to the past; music with elaborate line(s); music written for amateur performers; transcription; and instrumentalists that move as part of the performance. These recurring features of Finnissy's composition could be considered indicative of this anthropological approach; they are informed by an investment in people that aspires to musical and personal transformation.

During the 2014 International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Berlin-based composer Mark Andre (b. 1964, Paris) lectured specifically on how his own compositional practice is concerned with ‘interstices that occur between compositional polarities – the affect, the appearance, the families of time and sound, the families of impulse responses – before they unfold themselves fragile, shadowy, breathlessly and fade away’. Drawing upon Andre's teachings at Darmstadt, as well as certain theories on existence put forward by Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Pierre Boulez, this article will work to prise open and unfold a broad, contextual backdrop for theorising the composer's own compositional practice. In particular, this article will argue that Andre, like the authors named above, uses the position of interstices to contest the working of ‘synthetic’ structure in (Western) civilisation, and so relieve, even if momentarily – by allowing ‘being’ to freely resonate, even speak – any notion of synthetic impingement.

Queer processes abound in fixed media electroacoustic music with voice, in both the composition and listening processes. ‘Queer’ means transgressive, unstable, and disruptive, and queer processes break down restrictive traditional binaries. In this article, I name the queer where some may have thought it does not or could not exist, in well-known works by Berio, Stockhausen and Lucier, as well as lesser-known works by Truax, Normandeau and Westerkamp. Any claim to the queer in these electroacoustic works is inherently political because the core of the term's meaning is to disrupt and perturb the status quo, which is maintained by existing power structures. I outline how composers unsettle the gendered voice and exploit its mediating role between the body and language. Studio manipulation is further enhanced by the acousmatic listening context, which is intimate and unsettling (‘queer’), and can depict the ‘third space’ between the bodies of the voice and listener.

Julian Anderson has been interestingly public about the genesis of his new orchestral piece Incantesimi, co-commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and Boston Symphony Orchestra, writing about its genesis in The Guardian as a trailer to its UK Proms premiere. Premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle in June 2016, Incantesimi toured to Rotterdam and Lucerne before opening that orchestra's Prom (Rattle's last as their chief conductor) in September. Wanting not to write a ‘showpiece’ but instead ‘something slow and quiet’, Anderson described Incantesimi as a ‘nocturne’ which takes its musical inspiration from Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, in that five themes are deployed ‘in perpetual orbit’. He also spoke of his focus on the Berlin Philharmonic's beauty of sound as a prompt to write something that would unfold slowly.

The Salzburg Festival publicity office knew that it had a major musical event on its hands. Before the premiere of Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel on 28 July 2016, they held a reception for the world's press on a rooftop balcony overlooking the old town (which, in the name of investigative journalism, your intrepid TEMPO correspondent attended). The procession from such genteel surroundings and through the bustling Hofstallgasse into the auditorium, in which bells were already chiming in the orchestral pit and sheep were standing patiently on stage, enacted one of the central themes of the opera: that of the passage from bourgeois respectability (and, let's be frank, privilege) into a world that is less predictable, less explicable.

The Gaudeamus Muziekweek is now in its sixty-ninth year and, as ever, it focuses on young music pioneers, in hopes of presenting a snapshot of the newest ideas in contemporary music being developed across the world. The festival's dense and diverse programming is compressed into five full days, in 2016 from 7 to 11 September, squeezed principally within one labyrinthian building, the TivoliVredenburg, whose impressive monolithic glass exterior imposes itself as a pillar of cultural life in central Utrecht. Amid this density, it is impossible to provide anything but a partial account of the festival, and my presentation is far from impartial, as I was one of the five nominated composers for this year's Gaudeamus Award. If only from these fragments and particular foci, then, I will present my own reactions and estimations of how the festival has highlighted some of the innovations and interests of a few of the newest practitioners of new new music.

A theme for the festival in Donaueschingen was popular music, or so I heard in a radio broadcast on the six-hour drive from Berlin to that little Southern German new music metropole. But in Donaueschingen, there really wasn't that much pop music; the theme was actually a kind of after-construction, something that had, according to the festival director Björn Gottstein, crystallised as a kind of a common denominator in several of the works that had been commissioned. For me this felt like grabbing something out of the void; in the three days of the usual intense programme, it hardly shone through as something specific.

The first weekend of the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival saw an eclectic and vibrant mix of musical events. Artistic director Graham McKenzie promised a festival that was going to be ‘undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making’, and the opening days also manifested a strong sense of artistic difference and distance as well. The presence of Georg Friedrich Haas, this year's Composer in Residence, and Rebecca Saunders seemed to fire up such underlying dynamic energies. Throughout the weekend both composers took part in public interviews and both had UK and world premieres, yet they only presented in parallel: the programming kept them apart. In turn, the weekend amplified various levels of similarity and divergence between the two composers, exposing some fascinating creative tensions.

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival leaves an indelible impression on any brave soul who ventures into the chill, dark November nights across its ten days, a rite of passage challenging conceptions of the stuff music is made of. Now in its thirty-ninth year, this is one of the more established contemporary music festivals, yet it never fails to provoke and stimulate, a snapshot of current musical preoccupations. The first weekend traditionally showcases a selection of significant works, setting the tone for the subsequent week, and 2016 was no exception. Jennifer Walshe and the Arditti String Quartet opened the festival in a ‘declaration of love to life on earth’. EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2016) is an eco-treatise on the bombardment the world is suffering – a torrent of visual and vocal disturbance with the arch-complexist Arditti gamely along for the ride, a playful synergy of theatre, voice and string quartet, preparing us for what was to come over the next few days.

Two concerts in Liverpool in autumn 2016 celebrated the sixtieth birthday year of James Wishart, the composer, pianist, conductor, writer and concert promoter who has been a major figure in musical life in the north west of England for nearly four decades. His music reflects his wide cultural and social interests and these concerts showcased three compositions that were witty, emotionally searing and sonically daring.