The music of British-Albanian composer Thomas Simaku (b. 1958) bears the hallmarks of both his formative training and working life in Albania, and the widening of musical palette that came with his move to the UK in 1991. In this article the music from the late 1990s to the present day is considered, with particular attention to more recent works. An overview of some stylistic and technical aspects of this music is offered through analytical observations centred on three dualities: simplicity and complexity, the individual and the group, and stasis and movement. This wide-ranging account aims to open the door for further scholarship around this rich and multifaceted music.

I am no believer in historical determinism, nor am I a Scottish (or any other kind of) nationalist, but the fact that The Sixteen should commission James MacMillan to set anew the text used by Robert Carver in his 19-part motet O bone Jesu brings a profound satisfaction. No one else could have tidied up five-centuries-old loose ends as he. Carver (c. 1487–1566) was part of the dizzyingly rich flourishing of Scottish culture in the early years of the 16th century – a Catholic culture, doused by the dour sincerity of the Reformation (the MacTaliban, if you wish). MacMillan, a dry-eyed member of Scotland's Catholic minority, is the first composer since those days whose combination of faith and accomplishment allows him to pick up the glove torn from Carver's hand. His O bone Jesu – given its first public airing by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Chistophers at Southwark Cathedral on 10 October, at the outset of a year-long tour that takes them round the British Isles and to North America – may not quite reach Carver's Olympian heights (no other Scottish composer has achieved commensurate greatness) but it exploits a striking range of emotional reference nonetheless.

The full score of Béla Bartók's one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) reached its final form through many intermediate stages and after many years. The most comprehensive revision had been carried out in 1917 before Bluebeard was finally put on the programme of the Budapest Opera House. Bartók's revisions concerned not only the ending of the opera and the vocal parts but also the instrumentation. On the basis of all available primary sources, the present article examines how the instrumentation changed between 1911 and 1925, when the full score was published by Universal Edition. As a result of experiences gained during rehearsals of The Wooden Prince in 1917, Bartók added two instruments, the celesta and the xylophone, which he had originally not used in Bluebeard. However, the original score included two tenor tuba parts, which he later replaced with trumpets and trombones. In the revised score Bartók applied new instrumental techniques, corrected an unplayable passage, made the orchestral material thinner in favour of the vocal parts, and altered the instrumentation in order to emphasize motivic connections. Most of these alterations, however, do not represent a conceptual change in the opera's instrumentation but rather realize Bartók's original ideas in a more precise and more elaborate way.

‘The Tend'rest Breast’: settings of women’s poetry by QUILTER, BRIDGE, GURNEY, LENNOX BERKELEY, IRELAND, ALASTAIR KING, MADELEINE DRING, MONTAGUE PHILLIPS. Georgina Colwell (sop), Nigel Foster (pno). Dunelm DRD0237.

‘Strings in the Earth and Air’: settings by MOERAN, WARLOCK, GEOFFREY STERN. Paul Martyn-West (ten), Nigel Foster (pno). Dunelm DRD0249.

In its unswerving devotion to new music at its most uncompromising, the Flemish Transit Festival represents a model of the kind of festival that has now almost vanished from Britain. Based in the intimate university town of Leuven, the 2012 festival was the thirteenth: 48 hours of music and events concentrated into a weekend, running from Friday night to Sunday (26–28 October). Located mainly in the unprepossessing concrete 1970s STUK arts centre (with surprisingly good acoustics), the 12 events (plus pre-concert talks) followed upon one another with a rapidity that almost negated the opportunity to draw breath, let alone eat in between.

MANSURIAN: Monodia. Viola Concerto (‘…and then I was in time again’); Violin Concerto; Lachrymae; Confessing with Faith. Kim Kashkashian (via), Leonidas Kavakos (vln), Jan Garbarek (ss), The Hilliard Ensemble, Münchener Kammerorchester c. Christoph Poppen. ECM New Series 472 7842 (2-CD set).

ELLIOTT CARTER: Dialogues; Boston Concerto; Cello Concerto; ASKO Concerto. Nicolas Hodges (pno), Fred Sherry (vlc), London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, ASKO Ensemble, c. Oliver Knussen. Bridge 9184.

MAXWELL DAVIES: De Assumtione Beatae Mariae Virigins; Brass Quintet; Beacons of Hope; Commemoration Sixty; Blind Man's Bluff; Prayer of Thanksgiving in Times of Terror; A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times. London Sinfonietta c. Oliver Knussen; The Wallace Collection; Central Band of the Royal British Legion c. Ted Whealing; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Central Band of the Royal British Legion, Trumpets of the Royal Military School of Music – Kneller Hall, London Symphony Chorus c. Peter Maxwell Davies; Lucy Shelton, Clare Booth; Choir of Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, St. James' Palace c. Andrew Gant; Pavel Haas Quartet. MaxOpus Custom Compilation CDs.

MAXWELL DAVIES: Naxos Quartets Nos. 5 and 6. Maggini Quartet. Naxos 8.557398

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

The American symphonic output of the 20th century is still, for the vast majority of the music-loving public, a largely unexplored territory. Although in the past few years there has been some renewal of interest in this area of modern music, we remain in ignorance of some of its most characteristic composers. None more so than Roy Harris (1898–1979), whose birth centenary fell on 12 February this year and who used often to be described as America's leading symphonist. Certainly his Third Symphony is one of the few internationally recognized American works in the genre, yet most of the rest of his works remain virtually unknown, even in the USA.

A tedious title, this, but a thought which will remain with us for a long time, and which I am therefore adopting as a permanent title for my regular feature. We have to cope with the problem so long as it exists. The two usual, alternative ways of escaping it are (1) to deny its existence, or (2) to regard it as unsolvable. The first route is usually taken by composers, the second by resigned music lovers. We shall see in the course of these quarterly notes whether there is, perhaps, a third.

‘I have the greatest regard for Goehr, but I think his music gets worse and worse,’ one of our senior chroniclers of the avant-garde remarked to me some five years ago: ‘First it was neo-expressionism, then neo-romanticism, now it is neoclassicism—where will it end?’ To be fair, the same speaker has since endorsed with delight Goehr's setting of Psalm IV (1976). Moreover, any indictment of backsliding from historical necessity has been complicated, for instance, by the composition of the ‘expressionistic’ Symphony in One Movement (1970) two years after the ‘romantic’ Romanza for Cello and Orchestra (1968), and by Goehr's considerable success in approaching an ideal of piano writing as ‘a sort of Bach crossed with Debussy—polyphonic impressionism’ in Nonomiya (1969). And, as I have already argued, his reclamation of ‘historical’ procedures and genres could be seen as the necessary complement to the stability of the serial-modal, bloc sonore harmonic method he developed after the Two Choruses (1962)—in other words, as modifications and enrichments of a technique and aesthetic essentially deriving from the Modern Masters. Yet it must be admitted that any residual questions posed by such a synthesis would seem vastly more pressing in the light of his unexpected progress since the appearance of Psalm IV.

Thirty-six years after the completion of September from the Vier Letzte Leider, presumed to be the last work penned by Richard Strauss, an autograph manuscript reappeared containing a lied composed for solo voice and piano, and it is this which is now considered to be the last completed work of Strauss. It is entided Malven (Mallows), set to the poem by Swiss poet and novelist, Betty Wehrli-Knobel (b. 13 July 1904). The lied was completed in Montreux on 23 November 1948, a full two months after Strauss had finished September, and bears the dedication to Maria Jeritza: Der geliebten Maria dieser letzte Rose!

In his prefatory ‘Note’ to the full score of Tabuh-Tabuhan (eventually published by AMP Inc. 1960), McPhee wrote:

Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936 and first performed by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technique. The title of the work derives from the Balinese word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat… Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive. In a subtitle I call the work Toccata for Orchestra and two pianos.

In the 1920s there were plenty of new opportunities for young composers to meet colleagues of all ages in the many circles, societies and associations which were then in existence. The most interesting, though short-lived of them was the Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music (LASM), which declared itself to be ‘a gathering of everyone connected with music today’. The Association was planned as a local branch of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) and of the central Moscow association. But in fact the LASM acted quite independently. Its founders were people who were already well-placed and even high-ranking in the country's musical life: the musicologists and critics Boris Asafyev (Igor Glebov), Vyacheslav Karatigin, Alexander Ossovsky and Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, the composers Yuliya Weysberg, Alexander Zhitomirsky, Andrey Paschenko, Yuriy Tyulin, Maximilian Shteinberg, Lyubov Shtreikher-Bikhter and Vladimir Shcherbachev. Their first meeting took place on 15 April 1925 at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov and Weysberg.