The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interesting to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another. Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of them.

In the ultimate assessment of Delius's art it is conceivable that his songs will occupy a somewhat minor place. In bulk, they do not loom very large in the catalogue of his works—a mere fifty or so in all, and of these perhaps a sixth were apparently not deemed by the composer worthy of publication. Yet it would be a pity to underrate them merely on the ground of their slender numbers or because Delius himself was apt in later life to deprecate, more especially, his early efforts. For it is sometimes the case that a composer will reveal himself and his idiosyncrasies in his first stumbling attempts and even more readily in the miniature than in the larger composition. Delius did not spring into the world fully armed but his basic idiom changed relatively little and no one can fail to find traces of the authentic Delius finger-print in his songs of all periods.

• Wilfrid Mellers Between Worlds Geoffrey Alvarez

• Ernest Ansermet on Music Peter Palmer

(The following conversation between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Juan María Solare took place in Kiirten – the small village near Cologne, Germany, where he has lived for many years – on 7 August 1998, during the ‘Stockhausen-Kurscn 1998’. The intention of these courses was, in his own (messianic) words: ‘Forward what I've tried to explain to your own students, wherever you work’. Through a whole week numerous pieces of Stockhausen had been performed in Kiirten, including several of his early works, composed almost half a century ago.)

George edwardes was a great man. He was not in any sense an artist, and was curiously insensitive to music, being unable to whistle correctly any of the tunes from his numerous successes. Some of the things he did to music were atrocious, for example the amputation of the opening music from Gypsy Love and the casting of Joe Coyne for the part of Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow.

Q: What is ‘Orango’?

A:Orango is an unfinished satirical opera, sketched in 1932 when Shostakovich was in the middle of writing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Picking the chocolate-coated plums – a traditional Polish treat – from the abundance of riches on offer at the 45th annual Warsaw Autumn Festival (20–28 September 2002) sets a delectable challenge. Most of the concerts were packed, and predominantly with young people; its events were held in venues ranging from the elegant National Philharmonic to the sleek Warsaw Stock Exchange; and a typically diverse range of contemporary music, programmed with insight and performed with great commitment, drew enthusiastic – and occasionally enthusiastically critical – responses from the audiences. Indeed, while the plentiful supply of complimentary chocolate bars from sponsors E. Wedel certainly helped sustain energy levels during the nine hectic days of events, the reflexive stylistic juxtapositions created this Autumn's true momentum.

David Matthews has asked us to correct an inadvertent error in his First Performance review of Pavel Novák's Preludes and Fugues performed by William Howard (p. 34). The statement that the work lasts 17 minutes is incorrect: the actual duration is about 80 minutes.

As a pianist I spent many hours practising the connection between my touching and my listening, adjusting the pressure and weight of touching the keyboard to elicit just the right sonic texture in a note. As a composer I have spent years exploring the connection between my embodied act of notating and its potential sonic reality. Both these endeavours are acts of honing cross-modal activity. As I continue to qualify my experiences of sound and working with sound through language in instances like this – writing about my practice – I find myself constructing an increasingly complex and expanding web of linguistic gymnastics, in an attempt to explain, explore and grasp the slippery subject of listening.

Since November 2004 Simon Emmerson has been Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, following 28 years as Director of the Electroacoustic Music studios at City University, London. As a composer he works mostly with live electronics; he has also completed purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB (Bourges) and the GRM (Paris). In addition to extensive writings on the subject, he was founder Secretary of EMAS (The Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain) in 1979, and served on the Board of Sonic Arts Network from its inception until 2004. He is a Trustee of its successor organisation ‘Sound and Music’. This interview took place in July 2008.

JOHN TAVENER: Schuon Lieder. Patricia Rozaro (sop), Gillian McDonagh (temple bowls), The Schubert Ensemble. Black Box BBM1101.

Varèse Rodney Lister

Philip Moore, Organist Emeritus of York Minster was one of the main featured composers at this year's London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, now in its twelfth consecutive year. A week of concerts and services at St Pancras Church in London showcases a number of new works, and this year saw new choral pieces by Gordon Crosse, Diana Burrell and Ed Hughes (whose Chaconne for organ was composed in memory of Jonathan Harvey, who died on 4 December 2012 at the age of 73). The Festival also marked Robin Holloway's 70th birthday, with a concert of his choral works on 17 May.

• London, Royal Opera House: ‘Promised End’ Tim Mottershead

• Amsterdam: Raskatov's ‘A Dog's Heart’ Alexander Ivashkin

• Glasgow: James Dillon's ‘Nine Rivers’ Paul Conway

• Zurich: Dalbavie's ‘Gesualdo’ Peter Palmer

• Tanglewood Festival 2010 Christian Carey

• Manchester: Friedrich Cerha Kaleidoscope Tim Mottershead

• Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2010 Paul Conway

• Further reports from London, Manchester, Birmingham, St Albans Martin Anderson, Jill Barlow, Tim Mottershead, Paul Conway

The oeuvre of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is based upon extreme musical repetition. In his Monadologie series (2007-present), short samples of pre-existing music form the starting point for a variety of automatically generated looping and transformation processes. The overwriting of pre-existing music results in the creation of meta-compositions that radically alter the listeners' understanding of the original piece.

Sketching a general overview of the composer's aesthetic beliefs and the compositional strategies originating from them, this article focuses on Lang's Monadologie series. It aims to clarify the relationships between the individual pieces of the series, to analyse the musical techniques used to reinterpret pre-existing scores within a contemporary setting and, finally, to interpret the implications that arise from that procedure. The 2009 Monadologie VII: …for Arnold… functions as a historico-analytical case study, from which a deeper insight into the series' hermeneutics can be gained.