In an age when music has become increasingly mechanistic and more concerned with sound than content; when the language of music has become a veritable tower of Babel addressing itself to minorities of minorities; when dense ingenuity, often accompanied by pages of notes explaining what it is doing, is hardly even penetrable by the eye let alone the ear, and memorability is often more minimal than the minimalists, Hans Gál is bound to be a lone voice. He is, after all, 95 years old and learnt his craft from distinguished masters of the 19th century, imbibing the classical tradition in a world which could still lay some claim to civilization: that is before the First World War set in train increasingly rapid developments in technology and a steady decline in standards. If the artist's task is to reflect the world around him, then he has done this admirably. If he aims to expose society's weaknesses, it would seem that the forces of evil are winning. If he aims to console and heal—creating images of reconciliation in a barren world, as Tippett so tellingly puts it—then Hans Gál has certainly played his part in this reconciliation and it is our loss that his music is so little known in this country. Surprising, too, for he has been with us for nearly 45 years, composing, conducting, teaching, lecturing, and playing, but having no gimmicks to offer, no ad-man to promote him; and thus, being an essentially private man, never seeking to impose himself—‘the most unpushy composer I have ever met’ as one German radio producer puts it—comparatively few have had a chance to discover his worth.

A critique of politically engaged art is that gallery-dwellers, concert-goers and theatre-lovers share the same political inclination as the artists. Often known as ‘preaching to the choir’, the critique holds that art's power to challenge and persuade is rendered valueless when it is experienced only by people who already hold the same (typically leftist) ideas. In this article I suggest three distinct yet interconnected responses to this critique: namely, ‘expanding’, ‘galvanising’ and ‘activating’ the choir. In the first part I explore ‘expanding’ and ‘galvanising’ through works by Stefan Prins, Sarah Nicolls, Pamela Z and Soosan Lolavar. In the second half I discuss how I ‘activate’ the choir in my own work.

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.

Jazz was a product of the confrontation of two worlds. The African Negro, transported in slavery, took with him to his new land his native musical traditions, which were corporeally rhythmic and vocally modal; and these came into contact—and before long into conflict—with the harmonic conventions of the West (specifically those of the march and hymn). Out of this tension was generated the classic form of the blues, the traditional basis of jazz. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the black man in America created a music that expressed not only his powerful protest against dispossession, but also a nostalgia for ‘the beauty of his wild forebears’; and (which was more remarkable) the white man too came to recognize in the black man's music a vitality and spontaneity which he, in his modern self-consciousness, had lost.

Jörg Widmann's work embraces everything music history – and beyond – has to offer: Lachenmann, Boulez, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke's Late Sonnets and the Screaming Pope paintings of Francis Bacon. His transformative re-imagining of traditional forms is seen nowhere better than in the Jagdquartett, the third in a cycle of five quartets that comprise the core of his œuvre. In the interview around which this article is based he discusses the Jagdquartett and its inspirations in detail, and the possibility of his music representing a kind of meta-modernism.

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.

This reply addresses a number of misunderstandings that have arisen with regard to my argument in ‘Composition is not Research’; notably that it rests on a definition of research derived from ‘scientific method’, and that it somehow entails the view that composers should not be asked to write about their music. It is argued here that referring to composition as ‘research’ is at best a perverse (if institutionally expedient) way of talking about what composers have always done, and at worst leads to a distorted picture of compositional work and musical value.

• Reviews by Paul Conway, Bret Johnson, Brian Thompson, Peter Palmer, Arnold Whittall, Calum MacDonald, Michael Graubart, Tim Mottershead

In two nights in New York, I saw three world premieres and four other recent pieces at two very different concerts. Friday, 15 November at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn was the concert FOR, the first of two nights called FOR/WITH curated by the trumpeter Nate Wooley. The venue was celebrating the life of its late founder, the artist Suzanne Fiol, and her work was displayed around the hall with an appropriate sense of reverence and intensity. Wooley featured a composer I admire, Eva-Maria Houben of the Wandelweiser collective, and an uncharacteristic solo trumpet piece that she wrote for him called chanting ballads. Like most of Houben's work it was stark, simple and repetitive, and seemed to place the performer in a battle with himself, its briefly sustained tones becoming daunting events, spaced as far apart from each other as they were. Unlike most of Houben's work, it took advantage of the trumpet's entire range of pitch and dynamic, which at first seems to be entirely out of place with the atmosphere of the work, but, as it goes on, one of course realizes that this is the point and there is so much in these bare, somewhat awkward trumpet sounds to listen for. Every extraneous sound – both from the trumpet and from the hall – becomes part of the piece. My mind moves to curation: does Houben's music demand more control over a concert? No phones maybe? I feel for the performer: while the work does what I love most about solo works, which is to take us out of the regular ‘concert’ feeling and give us the sense that we're witnessing a ritual with a strange tool, I then end up focusing on the performer's unintentional ornamentation. A few clammed notes: are they supposed to illustrate the fragility of the instrument, its tone and its user, or are they also intended as part of any tool's thorough exploration? I've played Houben: it's hard. I get it. But I do think the point is to be charitable as a listener and enjoy every sound equally, in an attempt to divorce oneself from preconceived notions of ‘successful’ playing. What at first seemed like quite an awkward undertaking became an empowering experience for me, and, one hopes, for Wooley as well.

It is a curious fact that there is very little crossover between studies on the visual arts and those on the auditory. There are general cultural histories, to be sure, but even in those the two are generally treated separately, following the habitual trend. There appear to be few people who can think equally easily in or with respect to both modes, despite honourable exceptions such as Richard Arnheim and Raymond Head. Yet there are grounds for thinking that music is intrinsic to the human psyche, starting with the obvious fact that, barring severe pathology, everyone includes music one way or another as an important component in their lives: the inference is that it is necessary. But this is material for wider study (as for example Zuckerkandl: Sound and symbol, Blacking: How musical is man, Tomatis: The conscious ear).

Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970) is one of the most widely performed living French composers, but his work is hardly programmed in Britain. He is well represented in commercial recordings and has been championed by the conductor Stéphane Denève across Europe and the United States. His music is in a post-minimalist, quasi-tonal language that is both engaging and contemporary, and he places himself in the firmly in the ‘musical family’ of French composers.

I was born on March 25th, 1881, in a small place, called Nagyszentmiklós, which now, together with the whole county of Torontál, belongs to Roumania. My mother gave me my first piano lessons when I was 6 years old. My father, who was the head of an agricultural school, was gifted musically and active in many directions. He played the piano, organized an amateur orchestra, learned the 'cello in order to play that instrument in his orchestra, and composed some dance music. I was 8 years old when I lost him. After his death my mother had to work as a school mistress and struggle hard for our daily bread. We first went to live at Nagyszöllös (at present Czechoslovak territory), then to Beszterce in Transylvania (at present Roumanian territory) and in 1893 to Pozsony (Bratislava, at present Czechoslovak territory). I began writing piano music when I was nine years old and made my first public appearance as a “composer” and pianist at Nagyszöllös in 1891; it was therefore a matter of some importance for us to settle at last in a biggish town. Among Hungarian country towns at that time it was Pozsony that had the most vigorous musical life, and by moving there I was given the possibility of having lessons in piano and composition with László Erkel (Ferenc Erkel's son) and also of hearing a few operas, more or less well performed, and orchestral concerts. I had the opportunity, too, of playing chamber-music, and before I was eighteen I had acquired a fairly thorough knowledge of music from Bach to Brahms (though in Wagner's work I did not get further than Tannhäuser). All this time I was also busy composing and was under the strong influence of Brahms and Dohnányi (who was 4 years my senior). Especially Dohnányi's youthful Opus No. 1 influenced me deeply.