The ‘Nocturne’ from Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) presents a number of interesting melodic and motivic features effectively modelled by aspects of diatonic transformational theories. Following a brief review of important transformational operations in diatonic set theory (transposition within Mod-7 diatonic space, diatonic interval cycles, and ‘signature transformation’), this article presents an analysis of the ‘Nocturne’ drawing upon both traditional and recent developments in diatonic transformational theory. Doing so illustrates an intricate compositional technique, one that traces motivic associations in the vocal line, the horn part and the accompanying strings. A close reading reveals that these motivic techniques stem from the generic concept of echoing and reverberation at the heart of Tennyson's poem.

One is always hearing it stated as an argument against opera that for quite a considerable time, say the last twenty-five years, nothing has been composed which has achieved world fame or even maintained its place in the repertory for a single generation. Yet a really thorough and knowledgeable examination—that is to say, one not impaired by partisan, doctrinaire points of view—would show that in the period from 1900 to 1950 a whole row of significant creations in the realm of music drama have come into being, which were wrongly judged as decadent, old fashioned, repetitive, eccentric or over ambitious, and were therefore put on the shelf until they suddenly rose up again through a lively new production, like the Phoenix from its ashes. So it was with Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten when, on 1st October 1949, it had its first performance on the American continent at the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires.

The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.

The composer Vladimir Vogel was born in Moscow in 1896. His mother was Russian, his father a businessman who came from Dresden. After the end of the First World War Vogel went to Berlin where he was admitted to Ferruccio Busoni's masterclass, along with Kurt Weill. His studies completed, his career was at first extremely promising, but it came to an abrupt halt with the relinquishing of power to the National Socialists. In jeopardy on three counts, as a Communist, a Jew and a so-called Neutöner or ‘new-note composer’, Vogel roamed Europe for a number of years. Finally he found a refuge in Switzerland, where he produced new compositions until the end of his life without managing to emulate his own early success. He died in Zurich in 1984.

In teaching Mikrokosmos to some four score children over a period of several years, I have realized that it serves numerous musical purposes beyond just that of being another series of pieces and studies for pupils. In addition to laying a strong and richly varied foundation for the understanding and performance of twentieth-century music, it presents almost unending varieties of situations for facilitating sight-reading and transposition. The work offers virtually every pianistic and musical problem to the student, and interestingly enough, its use gives him increased insight into music of the past as well as of the present.

Gerhard's first ballet-score, Ariel, came about in 1934 as a result of a meeting between the composer and Leonid Massine which had been engineered by Antal Dorati—though, in the event, Massine rejected the music for ballet purposes as ‘too symphonic’. Two years later, Dorati was the catalyst for a second time when he suggested to Colonel de Basil (for whose company he was then conducting) that Gerhard would be a suitable composer for a Spanish ballet. Wishing to hear some of Gerhard's work, de Basil visited him one evening in Barcelona with Massine and the lead dancer of his company, and Gerhard improvised various pieces in appropriate style for them at the piano. His friend the poet Ventura Gassol—Minister of Fine Arts in the Catalan Government—was also present, at Gerhard's request, to lend moral support. After Gerhard's rendition, the talk turned to possible Spanish subjects for a ballet and the desirability of incorporating traditional Spanish styles of dancing into the choreography; and Gassol proposed an expedition by car to the town of Berga, in the Pyrenees, to see—as a fine illustration of what they were discussing—the ancient folk festivities of ‘Saint John's Fire’ which would be in progress that night.

As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.

Apropos of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and its libretto, Gordon Crosse, in Tempo 85, submits that “an opera is a fusion of word, music and action in which, perhaps, only the music can bear separate scrutiny. W. H. Auden once described librettos as ‘private letters to the composers', and so they are”. On reflection and inspection, Gordon Crosse is much righter than Auden; as a matter of fact, he could hardly be righter. I'll take up the ‘hardly’ a little further down; for the moment, I want to rejoice that somebody has, at long last, said it. Crosse's may sound a slightly commonplace statement once it's out, but that is true of many propositions which hit the truth right at the centre.

The decades immediately following World War II constituted a flourishing period of musical innovation on the international scene, encompassing a considerable range of stylistic orientations and techniques. Exploration that led to genuinely innovative compositional practices involving relationships among melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre reached fruition by the mid-1980s. Accordingly, the challenge to composers who emerged during this latter period was twofold: to develop personal styles through a discriminating selection from this large heritage of techniques and stylistic resources – and, in the process, to avoid imitating composers who had used them earlier. In countries not dominated by any particular compositional doctrine – most notably the United States, Great Britain and the Nordic countries – important composers emerged as consolidators who combined and synthesized these resources in a fresh and individual manner. One who has responded most successfully to this challenge is Finland's Magnus Lindberg.

Leonid Desyatnikov is one of the most successful Russian composers of his generation and one of the most distinctive and individual on the contemporary Russian scene. He represents a rare instance of a contemporary composer in his mid-forties who has had all his works performed, some of them on many occasions. In the West, his music has been played by the Deutsche Sym-phony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His vocal cycle Five poems by F. Tyutchev has been performed recently in London and Aldeburgh. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Gidon Kremer became the main champion of Desyatnikov's music; he has commissioned, performed and recorded a number of Desyatnikov's original works as well as his arrangements of Astor Piazzolla's music. To date, Kremer has performed Desyatnikov's Russian Seasons, for violin, female voice and string orchestra, composed in 2000, fifteen times in Europe, the Baltic countries and Russia. On 1 May 2002, he will present its American premiére at Carnegie Hall. The fact that Kremer, who earlier brought the music of such composers as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina to international attent ion, has now ‘chosen’ Desyatnikov speaks volumes for the quality of the music.

In Israel, music is a vital, living, breathing, pulsating, throbbing, inspiring and devotional part of the lives of the people. In Israel, music seems to fulfil so much of the emotional and spiritual needs of the people, that to the outside observer, the avidity and passion with which it is absorbed, (almost visibly chewed and swallowed) makes it virtually akin to the primal hungers of man.

During a visit to Scotland in 1970, I went for a holiday to Orkney: really just to see the things that everybody goes to see, such as the prehistoric stone circle remains and above all the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall—which, apart from being an extraordinary architectural monument, has musical associations. Those of us who have done music at university are familiar with the 12th-Century ‘Hymn to St. Magnus’, which was composed for that building. And so I went there and it was rainy and rather grim; but that you expect and put up with.

The Strauss Operas of the Gregor collaboration, Friedenstag (1935/6), Daphne (1935/7), and Die Liebe der Danaë (1936/40), have sadly failed to establish themselves in the international repertoire. They are, indeed, often dismissed out of hand as products of an inspirational lapse on the composer's part; as works which, standing outside the main stream of his development, represent a musical ‘backwater’ into which he was driven by the exigencies of his times. Careful study of these operas, however, marks them not only as consummate examples of Strauss's musical craftsmanship, but also as documents of considerable significance in relation to the rest of his creative oeuvre.

Like many friends of Kodály, I find myself having to grapple with a sense of being stricken beyond comfort, and a warring disbelief that he is dead at all. Scattered all over the world is a body of people who have felt the personal magnetism of this extraordinary man, and whose lives have been radically changed as a result. Mátyás Seiber eloquently described the ‘peculiar, suggestive, compelling force that issues from him’, and how his teaching was invested with a touch of Buddhism, which forced his pupils to redeem themselves. That power is no less operative now that he is dead; it is if anything intensified, and people who have been aware of his standards find themselves impelled to take up the challenge that they represent.

The compositional output of Michael Finnissy includes several major cycles for piano solo, which stand out by reason of their dimensions and their scope. English Country-Tunes (1977/1982–85), Verdi Transcriptions (1972–92/1988–95/2002-), Gershwin Arrangements (1975–88) and Folklore (1993–94) are all long, technically demanding and full of expressive potential. Yet they have been outdone by Finnissy's most recent piano cycle: The History of Photography in Sound (1995–2001), a phenomenal endeavour, lasting over five and a half hours and employing every conceivable means of articulating musical expression and intellectual significance. Speaking of the scope of these works, however, does not merely entail their unusual length – although the extended duration, in comparison to what is considered customary for a solo piano piece, is indeed one of their prominent features. What is more significant here is their scope in terms of the wide array of ideas, concepts and statements that make up the musical text. In that respect, Folklore (like the other pieces mentioned here) is an unrelenting statement, reflecting upon or formulating a critique of many issues that are crucial to late-20th-century human existence. This article tries to demonstrate how all these layers of significance can indeed form the subject of a piece that is supposed to be ‘abstract’ (because textless, instrumental) music.