Every artistic medium reflects some area of human experience. These areas often overlap but never coincide, for if two media could do the same thing equally well one would be unnecessary.

When someone, like myself, after years of working in one medium, essays another for the first time, he should always, I believe, try to discover its proper principles before starting work. Otherwise he is in danger of carrying over assumptions and habits of mind which have become second nature to him into a field where, as a matter of fact, they do not and cannot apply.

London, Barbican: Salonen's ‘Wing on Wing’

With these words, Pierre Boulez opened the article entitled ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ in 1963. Referring to his Third Piano Sonata – portions of which first appeared in 1955 – Boulez presented his arguments supporting compositions that contain ‘open’ or ‘mobile’ forms. ‘Fluidity of form must integrate fluidity of vocabulary’, Boulez stated.

The British Library recently acquired the sketch material for a good number of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, ranging from some of the earliest pieces up to, at the time of writing, music of the early 1990s. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the available material and to demonstrate some of the valuable insights it affords into the composer's working methods.

Alexander Schubert's WIKI-PIANO.NET is an internet-based score, commissioned by the author and performed by him on an international tour from 2018 to 2020. The website score contains modules of notation, text, images, video and sound that can be edited by any member of the public, similar to a Wikipedia page. This article explores the huge volume and variety of content added to the score over the first 20 months after the premiere, and the extreme compositional approaches and unusual patterns of internet behaviour displayed. Examining these contributions offers insights into the online culture of new music, including its approaches to humour, its creative competitiveness, its mastery of memes, and its sophisticated subversions of the relationship between composer, performer and audience.

JAMES WOOD: Crying Bird, Echoing Star. GORDON McPHERSON: Explore Yourself. EDWARD DUDLEY HUGHES: The Sibyl of Cumae. ROWLAND SUTHERLAND: Timeless Odyssey. ROLF HIND: The Horse Sacrifice. The New Music Players: Rowland Sutherland (fls), Fiona Cross (cls), Mieko Kanno (vln), Michael Atkinson (vlc), Richard Casey (pno), Tim Palmer (perc,), Louise Mott (mezzo); Paul Sherman (db), c. Patrick Bailey and Roger Montgomery. London Independent Records LIR003

• Northcott and Scruton Tim Rutherford-Johnson

• Peter Schmelz's ‘Unofficial Soviet Music’ Alexander Ivashkin

• William Alwyn's ‘Composing in Words’ Paul Conway

‘Passed by the political censor’ – Commissar Lunacharsky

The new Russian generation of composers in 1920s Russia is widely known as the ‘musical avant-garde’. Maximilian Shteinberg, the professor of the Petrograd-Leningrad Conservatoire, who studied under Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, called his pupils more simply: ‘musical lefties’. The older generation tried to define this new trend that was evolving as the younger generation' explorations in the fields of musical systems, sounds, subjects, etc. Among the radical musical events in 1920s Soviet Russia, the quarter-tone system of temperament takes first place.

Stravinsky said that he dreamed regularly, that his dreams were ‘the ground for innumerable solutions in my composing activity’. But it is just these composerly dreams about which he has been reticent. Instead, he has recalled the ‘time dreams and counting dreams [which] are common with me, and … dreams in which people shout, but inaudibly’. And again, ‘I am forever trying to tell the time and forever looking at my wrist watch, only to find it isn't there’. Then there was the dream of being a hunchback, which presaged an attack of intercostal neuralgia brought on by nicotine poisoning; another about the scent of Debussy's Eau de Cologne; and one more about his passport, ‘very yellow’. There are no musical portents in these dreams; but of the ones that are musical, the most practical was the one that prescribed the instrumentation of the Octet; and the most bizarre, even Freudian, was the pink dream (‘I often dream in colour’), during the time he was composing Threni, about the two warm, gelatinous, testicular eggs supporting ‘an elastic substance stretching exactly between the two notes [of an interval] I had composed.’ The tension of the stretched substance assured him that his interval was the right one.

It is perhaps curious that only a year after this exchange took place in 1981, Ligeti completed his Horn Trio – which uses traditional ternary form, a passacaglia (although a disguised one), a strong melodic focus, and a harmonic language which contains clear triads and dominant sevenths in abundance. In spite of his assertions above, it does seem as if Ligeti, in addition to rejecting the Avant-garde, is looking to the past for major elements of his musical language.

Bartok's musical language may be approached from two points of view—one, in which the concepts and terminology are derived from folk-music sources, and the other, in which the concepts and analytical tools are derived from certain currents in contemporary music. The present essay is intended to demonstrate, through a study of selected pieces from the 14 Bagatelles for piano, opus 6 (1908), that the assumptions underlying both approaches are essential in understanding the evolution of Bartók's musical language, and that fundamental relationships exist between the diatonic folk modes and various abstract pitch formations commonly found in contemporary compositions.

The difficulties connected with the idea of synthesis do not originate with the fact that as soon as he starts to elucidate the laws that have been formulated in general terms, Schoenberg postulates a musical space that only has two dimensions, the horizontal and the vertical. The scientific origin of these concepts could tempt one to think of this space (strictly geometrically) as a plane surface, and then to imagine it as comprising the paper on which music is notated, the dimensions then comprising the directions of the notation itself or of reading. But this is not yet musical space, and only if one tries to imagine a synthesis on this plane surface does one tend towards the concept of a diagonal. The inadequacy of the ‘diagonal’ seems to have been sensed by those authors who directed attention to the temporal aspect of music and who (perhaps by a popularizing analogy with the idea of time as the fourth dimension) attempted to locate the synthesis within the domain of ‘time’—say, the rhythmic domain. Schoenberg—and Webern followed him in this—distinguishes with terminological exactitude: wherever vertical and horizontal appear as concepts on their own, the explanation is always added: ‘The elements of a musical idea are partly incorporated in the horizontal plane as successive sounds and partly in the vertical plane as simultaneous sounds’; or: ‘In accordance with this [law], harmony and melody, vertical and horizontal, form a musical unit, a space, in both of whose dimensions the musical substance is deposited’, and similarly in the draft for the Princeton lecture. The conception of the dimensions of musical space is therefore connected with ‘harmony and melody’—without ‘vertical’ and ‘harmony’, or ‘horizontal’ and ‘melody’, thereby being identical. But how do matters stand on this plane with the ‘unit(y)’ that primarily interested Schoenberg and with the ‘synthesis’ upon which Webern apparently directed his attention?

LEES: Symphonies Nos. 2, 3 and 51; Etudes for piano and orchestra2. 1Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz c. Stephen Gunzenhauser, 2James Dick (pno), Texas Festival Orchestra c. Robert Spano. Albany TROY 564/565 (2-CDset).

LEES: Passacaglia. PERSICHETTI: Symphony No 4. DAUGHERTY: Philadelphia Stories; Hell's Angels. Oregon Symphony c. James De Preist. Delos DE 3291.

FLAGELLO: Symphony No. 1; Theme, Variations and Fugue; Sea Cliffs; Intermezzo. Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra c. David Amos. Naxos 8.559148.

HOVHANESS: Symphony No 22, City of Light1; Cello Concerto2. 2Janos Starker (vlc), Seattle Symphony c. 1Alan Hovhaness, 2Dennis Russell Davies. Naxos 8.559158.

HOVHANESS: Symphonies: No 2, Mysterious Mountain; No 50, Mount St Helens; No 66, Hymn to Glacier Peak; Storm on Mt Wildcat, op.2 no.2. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra c. Gerard Schwarz. Telarc CD-80604.

Queer processes abound in fixed media electroacoustic music with voice, in both the composition and listening processes. ‘Queer’ means transgressive, unstable, and disruptive, and queer processes break down restrictive traditional binaries. In this article, I name the queer where some may have thought it does not or could not exist, in well-known works by Berio, Stockhausen and Lucier, as well as lesser-known works by Truax, Normandeau and Westerkamp. Any claim to the queer in these electroacoustic works is inherently political because the core of the term's meaning is to disrupt and perturb the status quo, which is maintained by existing power structures. I outline how composers unsettle the gendered voice and exploit its mediating role between the body and language. Studio manipulation is further enhanced by the acousmatic listening context, which is intimate and unsettling (‘queer’), and can depict the ‘third space’ between the bodies of the voice and listener.

These extensively quoted statements, emanating from two of the most vociferous cultural ideologists of the Third Reich, give the impression that the Nazi regime formulated a highly consistent attitude towards ‘modernist’ trends in contemporary music. In reality, however, perceptions of the exact nature of ‘atonality’ and the ‘atonal’ movement in music remained notoriously imprecise. Six months before Rosenberg's address, for example, Hitler's Propaganda Minister Goebbels had erroneously denounced Hindemith as an ‘atonal musician’ who had succumbed to the ‘biting dissonances of musical bankruptcy’. Similarly, in 1938 Hans Severus Ziegler, organiser of the Degenerate Music Exhibition, had singled out the unequivocally tonal music of Hermann Reutter for particular criticism, claiming that it manifested severe symptoms of constructivism.

In future, those who look to anniversaries as a bulwark against the solvent flow of time will find their thoughts directed at once to Cathy Berberian who died 20 years ago in 1983, and to Luciano Berio, who died in 2003. This is apt enough. Their marriage lasted only fourteen years, from 1950 to 1964. But their creative trajectories were inextricably entwined. One does not get far in discussing the work of one without invoking the other.

This article explores aspects of identity which underlie compositional processes in James MacMillan's music. This is not intended as a critical discourse on identity as such, since this highly contested area is subject to ‘extensive and intensive controversy about how identity should be conceptualised in the wake of various anti-foundational critiques to which it has been subject’. Since in the course of this article I will use the essential concepts of ‘Scottish identity’ and ‘Catholic identity’ in particular as points of reference, it is necessary to show on what basis these terms have been conceived in relation to MacMillan.