This essay traces the development of Justin Connolly's music from the orchestral Antiphonies of 1966 through to the Piano Concerto of 2001–3, showing how within a remarkably consistent idiom there has been a slow process of focal change from a predominantly vertical structuring to a graciously complex, vertically rich, energetic linearity, embracing a wide variety of works on its unhurried journey, and by no means excluding drama and expressivity from its uncompromising idiom. Most of the analytical writing is on the Piano Concerto, which in its way summarizes all that precedes it, showing how a metaphorical labyrinth can be interestingly kaleidoscopic in its richness. The essay also demonstrates how, like several other British composers of his generation, Connolly has found his own individual, structurally significant way of bringing together techniques from the early Renaissance and the 20th century.

The toy piano is fast becoming a concert instrument in its own right, with its own (growing) body of repertoire that has moved well beyond John Cage's 1948 classic Suite for Toy Piano. There are dedicated musicians specialising in toy piano performance all over the world, and numerous composers producing new works written specifically for the toy piano. This unusual miniature instrument provides a respite from the traditional implications of the grand piano, breaks the ice with audiences and allows pianists to perform in locations that would otherwise be inaccessible. In this article the author introduces the history and mechanism of the instrument, performance considerations, extended techniques and approaches to working with electronics, recent repertoire and suggestions for performers and composers. Discussion is supplemented with musical examples.

This paper, originally the keynote address at a conference on notation in contemporary music held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in October 2013, examines the relationship between notation and improvisation in today's music. Starting from the position that improvisation is a method of composition, and that the two are in no way opposites, the author reflects on his dual practice as composer of often complexly notated scores and an improvising musician. The title subverts the familiar claim that it is improvisation that liberates the musician from the supposed tyranny of fixed notation, suggesting instead that notation may serve a valuable function in suggesting possible directions or points of focus in free improvisation.

One of the more telling indicators of Luigi Russolo's (1885–1947) Anglo-American reception is his description in Grove as an ‘Italian inventor, painter and composer’. Within this lurks the devaluation of his composing efforts in comparison to his work as the maker of intonarumori (noise instruments), his authoring of new aesthetic ideas, and his activities as a painter. There is little, perhaps, to argue with in this assessment, for (somewhat ironically) Russolo's music of the future has been consigned irrevocably to the music of the past; Raymond Fearn has suggested that ‘the musical remnants from this period have remained to a large extent in the realm of musical archaeology’. The only material traces available for musical archaeologists are the opening seven bars of the score of Il risveglio di una città (The Awakening of the City; 1913–14): the machines that were to play it were destroyed during the Second World War. The loss of Russolo's compositions has inevitably distorted our understanding of his work and has served to throw attention onto those progressive, and sometimes speculative, theoretical and mechanical aspects of it that have survived in written accounts, at the expense of those elements that are of a more traditional or pragmatic nature. Study of the remaining fragments of Il risveglio di una città, leavened with necessary doses of circumspection and speculation, forms a vital and hitherto under-utilized component to any assessment of Russolo's career.

Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–77) is one of the most successful operas of the 20th century in terms of the number of performances. Originally, Ligeti had intended to compose an ‘anti-opera’ in the manner of Kagel's Staatstheater, but changed his fundamental compositional approach during the process of composing the work. He realised that a more traditional opera with a clear narrative (unlike Kagel's avant-garde opera) was more suitable, and it therefore became necessary for him to transform his style to one in which the text was audible to an audience. As a result there is very little of his mature micropolyphonic technique in the resulting work, but rather there is an exploration of music from the past, and the use of parody. In composing his opera Ligeti revitalised his approach through a re-engagement with history, but combined with a modernist rigour; thus he was able to create a new and fruitful musical language, and to transform his compositional technique.

New Music thought and compositional praxis has excessively focused inward as a source of inspiration. In the last ten years, multidisciplinary composition has offered one possible solution to this problem. By combining music with theatrical elements and digital media, composers have produced works that are ‘not for the ears alone’. This paper offers a typification of its most novel aspects, and traces them in the author's own creative work, which additionally include the use of borrowed material as a means for establishing referentiality and elaborating semantic narratives.

Sir James MacMillan's Symphony No. 4 is claimed by the composer as an abstract work, but a clear programme is discernible through the use of references to the Roman Catholic Mass. MacMillan uses Gregorian chant, quotations from Robert Carver's Missa Dum sacrum mysterium (c. 1523) and his own St Luke Passion (2015) to create a liturgical form for the symphony. These allusions and their presentation in the symphony can be fruitfully understood in relation to Catholic theologies of time and the Eucharist. When allusions to sonata form are also taken into consideration, the result is a complex interaction between different experiences of time in the symphony's span.

The centenary year of one of the giants of 20th-century music has been and gone. It was all but ignored, so far as the UK is concerned, by his publishers, the musical establishment, the BBC etc. There had been vague plans to mount a number of relatively large-scale performances and broadcasts, to stage his two short operas for the first time and so on. They vanished. Music is a business like any other. Under the auspices of the Stefan Wolpe Society (USA), his daughter, the pianist Katharina Wolpe, managed to put together a short series of concerts in London recently, in which a few of his works received staggering performances before a very few people. The last of these, which would have seen the first performance for 2–3 decades of Wolpe's enormous Enactments for 3 pianos – had to be abandoned at the last minute for sudden lack of funds!

Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex is not a book which has pleased everybody, but it was the starting-point of this opera. This is not the place to analyse the book's deficiencies, real or alleged, but to assert that it tells skilfully a tense and dramatic story based upon historical persons and happenings. The late Sir Desmond MacCarthy, in his recently published Memories, recalls an interesting opinion that Elizabeth and Essex is almost a sketch for a play and that Strachey's method was inspired by or borrowed from the Elizabethan stage. Both the composer and the librettist of Gloriana were able to see in the book a sketch for an opera, and both are ready to acknowledge their debt to Strachey's dramatic sense. This does not mean that Gloriana is wholly based upon Elizabeth and Essex, or that it has emerged merely as an operatic version of that book. In the first place the makers of an opera are not under the obligation of even a picturesque biographer like Strachey to stick closely to history or chronology. Secondly, the makers of this particular opera came to be less concerned than Strachey with the amatory motives of the two principal characters and more concerned with the Queen's pre-eminence as a Queen, a woman, and a personality.

In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.

Getting to grips with Harrison Birtwistle's ever expanding oeuvre is becoming an increasingly challenging business. The forthcoming South Bank Centre festival naturally provides occasion for some critical stocktaking. Yet the retrospective schemas within which composers' works are traditionally placed seem less than usually appropriate. The idea of linear development is of as limited use to understanding Birtwistle's creative progress as it is to explaining his musical forms. Contrasting musical surfaces, for instance, testify to the difficulty of useful generalization about the recent works' lineage. Whereas the crisp, pulse-based clarity of many pages in The Cry of Anubis bears comparison with moments in Earth Dances and the contemporaneous Words Overheard, Panic's impenetrable textures and sonorities are more reminiscent of the earlier Verses for Ensembles and An Imaginary Landscape. The treatment of musical form in the recent works similarly resists summary description.

• Proms 2002 (1): Nørgård andTurnage Robert Stein

• Proms 2002 (2): Sawyer, Payne etc Martin Anderson

• London: Emigré composers Malcolm Miller

• Three Choirs Festival: Lionel Sainsbury's Violin Concerto Raymond Head

• Limousin: Roger Steptoe Malcolm Mille

I have been asked on a number of occasions recently whether I felt a heavy weight of responsibility during my work on Elgar's Third Symphony, and if this was an inhibiting factor. The question put me in a rather awkward situation, since a truthful answer was going to show me in a very immodest light. The fact is, my work on the project seemed to lie outside any feelings of awe and moral responsibility – because, quite simply, I was in love with the music and laboured for the sheer joy of it, without thought of ethical issues.

Nearly all our famous composers have now seen their names blazoned across the ‘credit titles’ of what America calls ‘motionpictures.’ The plot may be moronic, the dialogue the most basic English, but the music may now scale the Olympian heights of classical austerity, or plumb the mazy depths of atonality and every other form of modern anti-romanticism. Gone are the days when studios shunned doctors of music like straphangers dodge the passenger sneezing in a tube. Counterpoint is no longer contraband, nor fugue verboten, a man may make a canon without being fired.

Górecki lives in Katowice. He is a rare guest in Warsaw – usually he comes to the capital once a year, at the time of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. About his work, his plans and his achievements, he is reluctant to talk. By the same token, the promotion of performances of his works is not a matter with which he concerns himself, maintaining as he does that a score, and especially one that is published and therefore available to all who are interested in it, speaks for itself adequately enough to stimulate possible performers, or else leaves them cold.

My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.

The structural significance of the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones is expressed in the following statements by Arnold Schoenberg in ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (Style and Idea, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, p. 107):

After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundation for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones which are related only with one another.

Strawinsky often surprises his admirers. When they believe themselves to have discovered his æsthetic aims or located his place in history, he suddenly escapes from their observant eyes to emerge on quite a different spot where nobody had suspected him to dwell. His most recent works, the Cantata on old English poems, the Septet, and the Shakespeare Songs, show a contrapuntal strictness of a very special kind, which he has never attempted before.

The musical climate of the 1920s, when Copland came to maturity, was not favourable to the use of popular or traditional material or idioms in ‘serious’ composition. Nationalism was no longer a powerful force in the Western world. Increased respect for folk-musics as cultural relics inhibited composers from using them freely as composition sources. Popular music was associated with commercial exploitation and the wooing of a mass audience on the lowest common level, serious music with uncompromising devotion to Art for Art's sake. The leaders of revolutionary movements—Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, each in different ways—upheld the negative principle that one must not walk where men had walked before. The melodic and harmonic idioms of serious and popular music were growing steadily apart, serious music concentrating its meanings, increasingly concerned with a microstructure in which every detail was to be personal and expressive, popular music freely accepting melodic and harmonic cliché as an integral part of the language. Serious music rejected exact repetition as a means of driving home the message, popular music was heavily repetitive. Serious music often depended on intellectual construction-methods not to be appreciated by the unprepared listener; popular music demanded that all meanings should be immediately apparent.