Keiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a Canadian composer, originally from British Columbia, who now lives in Montréal. She began her musical career in piano-performance studies as well as composing, touring and recording several albums in independent rock bands. Her concert music is widely performed throughout Canada and Europe. From 2016–18, Keiko was the composer in residence of Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She joined Salvatore Sciarrino's masterclasses at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, between the years 2017 and 2019. Keiko was commissioned by music@villaromana festival, Florence, to create Echoic Memories. She is the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music (2020) and is also engaged in a two-year residency as a Carrefour composer with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2020–22). This interview was conducted over Zoom in late spring 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hans Abrahamsen has reused the same rhythm across four pieces spanning 33 years: in his Ten Studies, for solo piano, and Six Pieces, for horn trio (both from 1984), in Schnee (2008) and in Three Pieces for Orchestra (2017). Because self-borrowing is crucial to Abrahamsen's compositional practice, this rhythm provides a case study in his compositional priorities, particularly in the role canonic techniques play in his music. Although the rhythm's formal properties lend it a marked asymmetry at the foreground, it is presented in Schnee as part of a canon with highly symmetric pitch materials. But despite this apparent conflict between symmetries and asymmetries, Abrahamsen's music freely combines different approaches to the rhythm, as long as it is linked to a high-register shimmer, suggesting that Abrahamsen's noted uses of canons are largely for textural ends.

This article focuses on Radulescu's 1984 Subconscious Wave, for guitar and pre-recorded digital sound, a work that features on my 2019 solo CD recording Refracted Resonance, for Métier Records, alongside music by Tristan Murail, Christopher Fox, George Holloway and myself. The article places the work in the context of Radulescu's output, demonstrates how it displays the key aesthetic concepts that drive his music and shares my insights into the technical and interpretive aspects of preparing the piece for performance and recording. The article has been adapted from a lecture-recital given at the 2021 edition of the 21st Century Guitar Conference, which was hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Portugal in March 2021.

Sonorama is a 2015 sonic artwork by Claudia Molitor, consisting of a number of audio files designed for listening on a train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, and a graphic score based on the composer's own ‘reading’ of this journey. This article analyses the relationship between the sonic and the spatial in the work, exploring how Molitor's site-specific composition interacts with its environment on multiple scales. By drawing on the strategy of ‘situated listening’ developed by Gascia Ouzounian, as well as urbanist language introduced by Richard Sennett, this article seeks to elucidate the relationship between a number of ‘nested’ spaces, present across varying realisations, and the political agenda that energises the work. Written in the midst of summer 2015's European refugee crisis, the work brings into sharp focus themes of British exceptionalism, immigration and inclusion.

This article presents a survey of philosophical perspectives on the phenomena of ‘nature’ and ‘science/scientific’ in music and does so through a closer look at the first creative period of Péter Eötvös as a composer. Since the beginning of his creative career Eötvös has come into contact with issues scanning the relations between music and science, on the one hand, and music and nature, on the other. Considering Martin Heidegger's reflections on the nature of modern science as he articulated them in his Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938), one can recognise in Eötvös' first creative period (in works like Kosmos, Elektrochronik, Intervalles-Intérieurs, Tale, etc.) not only the motivating, inspiring force of science, but also the limits of this incentive.

This article considers the nature of the relationship between composers and musicologists and explores the aesthetic roots and ideas of my 5th String Quartet, Dancers on a Plane, which has recently been the subject of a musicological study.

Darmstadt was a bit different this year. The original 1946 courses had 120 registered participants in situ; I was told that the number this time around was larger (around 140), but only just. As an announcement for the final post-concert wrap stated, these were the COVID-19 courses. So: much smaller, much more concentrated, with almost every performance streamed online, and every other seat in the concert hall marked off with a weird sort of police tape with the Darmstadt logo on it. It's difficult to write about these things without lapsing into world-historical rhetorical posturing, as if the best lens to view the series of overlapping catastrophes we are living through is a biannual summer course for what, for better or worse, continues to be referred to as new music.

At its beginning Houses Slide is raised from complete darkness by 16 cyclists. Their pedalling powers the show; its constant woosh is the pedal point against which Laura Bowler's music is played. Both impressive and absurd, pedalling fast but getting nowhere, these cyclists are an apt symbol for the questions that Houses Slide raises. This London Sinfonietta commission explores the consciousness of the ecologically conscious. At the heart of the piece lies a paradox that has become part of our collective and personal anxiety. We are repeatedly told two contradictory things: that our actions are utterly disastrous (for example, heating the world, killing the whales) and, at the same time, that they are too insignificant to create positive change. How can we be simultaneously so dangerous and so ineffective? And what can we (guilty yet useless creatures as we are) do? These are the questions that come to mind as we listen to the recorded text that accompanies the piece throughout. This text is a verbatim record of personal testimonies gathered through the artists' call out to the public to submit answers to questions about how they've experienced the climate changing and what it makes them feel. Some speak of the disappearance of moths and hedgehogs, others of unseasonal snow or floods, and one voice candidly says that they haven't experienced any change at all, but they believe the scientists who tell them that change, the crisis, is happening.

The setting is Khye-Rell, part of a web of worlds in our universe's distant future. In this society, history is forbidden. A young girl, Kes'Cha'Au’, crosses a series of ‘transdimensional canals’, journeying back through our own time and our looming ecological collapse. She reveals, at the heart of everything, the universe creating itself out of nothing: it inscribes itself like a rune.

In his introductory preamble, Frank Madlener claimed that audiences would experience and hear The World After Covid during the 2021 edition of IRCAM's annual festival. Luckily a late change in French law allowed me to review an eight-day slice of this monde l’apres in person. (Full disclosure: one of my own pieces was performed at the last concert of the festival as part of a workshop with composer Isabel Mundry.)