This study explores Adams's interpretation of Baroque genres and his creative methods that draw on a relationship between past and present in the Violin Concerto. In this composition, Adams not only revives Baroque musical language through new performance practices, but also draws together diverse musical idioms, creating a way to communicate with our society. Repetition plays a large part in the Violin Concerto, but more in the sense of variation and sequences than of literal repetition. On the other hand, techniques such as the Lombard Snap and “unequal-note’ (notes inégales) are not treated in a traditional way. Structurally, although there is no trace of motivic connexion throughout the work, the music does not lack stylistic unity. The ‘harmonic’ language is generally consonant, which reflects Adams's honor of conventional musical sound. The Concerto certainly demonstrates the composer's creative imagination.

In this interview Gubaidulina discusses her understanding of religion and the way in which it relates to her music, by means of symbolism and metaphor. In particular she speaks of her understanding of the Apocalypse as a book of light, greatly influenced by the writings of Fr Aleksandr Men. She talks about the symbolism of instruments in her work, notably percussion, which she sees as a way to the subconscious; her understanding of the role of modernism in music, and the way in which her work connects with this historical process; and also her use of the Fibonacci sequence. The relationship of her music to liturgy is discussed, as is the double path, apparently contradictory, of the artist who composes both liturgical and concert music. The experience of the composer during the profound changes in music during the 20th century, specifically as regards possible intersections between modernism and spirituality, are also discussed.

In an effort to discover a more personal style, free of Wagnerian overtones and more truly representative of English culture, Hoist took the curious step of studying the Rig Veda in considerable depth. The year was 1907, a time when others too were searching for different ideas. In America the young Henry Cowell, disillusioned with romantic harmonies, sought (about 1908) new rhythmic and melodic possibilities in Oriental music and studied it under Oriental teachers. The year 1908 was important for Schoenberg, then—with the support of his close friends—on the point of bursting the chromatic dam to release expressionistic torrents. Beset with similar stylistic problems, Hoist went instead to Luzac & Co, an orientalist bookseller, and bought the two volumes of Ralph Griffith's translations of The Hymns of the Rigveda, the most ancient literature in the world. Through these hymns he returned to the source of Indo-Aryan culture in the hope that a new type of music, free of former constraints, would be suggested to him.

Contemporary music festivals are a neatly packaged way of encountering a variety of new and recent pieces, where someone else has done the hard work and chosen them for you. In our online/streaming life, rather than surfing Bandcamp or similar and following our own predilections, these festivals, in a healthy way, force you to confront your musical barriers and to harmonise your prejudices. In the UK and Ireland, Ilan Volkov's Glasgow Tectonics, Eamon Quinn's Louth and Graham McKenzie's Huddersfield seem to me the most interesting at the moment. There are, of course, other useful and enterprising festivals: some are a mixed bag of old and new, some are composer-led or have other agendas, so they have built-in filtering – in other words, prejudices. Festival directors have their likes and dislikes too, I guess, but the evidence from the three mentioned above demonstrates an openness and a researched risk-taking: Huddersfield, with McKenzie in charge, is more open than most, presenting quite a range of different genres and media.

One of the brightest stars in contemporary music, the American Christopher Rouse remains comparatively little known in the UK. A Baltimore native who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he had already served as composer-in-residence for two orchestras and his music was widely performed when his Trombone Concerto earned America's Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1993. Rouse has been particularly successful with orchestral works. He promises to be one of the next century's great composers in traditional forms, specifically symphony and concerto.

CECILIA MCDOWALL: Seraphim; Dance the dark streets; Dancing fish; Not Just a Place; Dream City; The case of the unanswered wire. Kathryn Thomas (fl), Catriona Scott (cl), Suzanne Willison (hp), Tippett Quartet, Orchestra Nova c. George Vass. DUTTON Epoch CDLX 7159

Howard Skempton's distinctive presence on the British musical scene, and his prolific compositional output since the mid-1960s, have presented commentators with certain challenges as they contemplate which labels to apply, and, for music analysts, which techniques to deploy. Skempton's own comments, in various interviews and essays down the years, remain the ideal starting point, suggest a range of contexts, some of which underpin this study. With reference to a few of his smaller vocal and keyboard compositions, the quality of constantly shifting rather than strictly fixed elements is explored. When pitch materials conform more or less exactly to tonal or modal tradition, rhythm is particularly important as a determinant of subtle shifting. But it is often the case that pitches identities themselves shift between functions best defined as tonal scale degrees at one extreme and post-tonal pitch classes at the other. The result is a very personal and unaggressive kind of modernism.

As a setting for the enactment of important or dramatic events, theatre may be located anywhere. The construction of special auditoria to accommodate aspects of theatre as an art form of re-presentation and re-enactment in no way invalidates the concept of a theatrical drama which unfolds in the imagination or in the arena of everyday life. Music, like theatre, may be inspired by real-life situations, but whereas in modern Western civilization it has taken on a life of its own, and is played in the rarefied isolation of concert halls, theatre, being a more concrete form of representational art, has retained much closer links with the outside world.

This article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

A distinguished musician, having glanced through the programme of the twentieth Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in London this July, asked “Why in a festival of modern music is there so little modern music?”—thus alluding to the large proportion of works by long-established composers.

In his writings on music Hans Keller includes Skalkottas among the few great twentieth-century composers of ‘symphonic thought’, and considers him to be the only ‘symphonic genius’ after Schoenberg whose ‘genius’ remains to be discovered. Although during the time of his writings, Keller was in a minority in his appreciation of this relatively minor composer in the Western art music canon, he did not analyse any of Skalkottas's music in support of his views, as he did with the works of other composers who, although important to him, are not elevated to such a high plane. This paper first gives an overview of Keller's approach to and understanding of symphonic thought, as presented in his various writings and exemplified in his analyses of Schoenberg's music. Subsequently, it examines certain of Skalkottas's 12-note works and the compositional techniques he applies to construct them, which exhibit these characteristics of symphonic thought defined by Keller, and which might be used to substantiate his unexplained but intuitively correct assertions.

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.

This article describes a design process for a composition system based upon the quarter-tone scale. As the semitone and quarter-tone scales share the same properties, a musical grammar based upon the former is used as a model to construct an analogous musical grammar based upon the latter. Within the scope of diatonic modal music, the organisation of pitches and durations is analysed from a scientific perspective. Several parameters are taken into consideration: scale, mode, chord, cadence, metre and rhythm. The one-to-one mapping of each facet of diatonic modality onto quarter-tonality results in diahemitonic modality.

We have not been so annoyed by a tendentious pronoun since Vaughan Williams used it in “Do we want to hear old music as its composers intended?”, for WE regard Cosi as Mozart's loveliest score, with its exquisite serenade-band trellised by the strings and its wealth of vintage lyricism; not even poor productions and bad singers have yet turned it into a long evening for US. Beethoven thought that Mozart wasted musical riches upon the improbable and immoral, but we excuse the narrowness of genius when it may be responsible for the ethical rapture of the best parts of Fidelio. (An improbable and immoral work, WE think. Speech days and open days arranged by prison authorities just to indulge a taste for choruses? And what a scurvy treatment of the lower sort of people! How these lofty democratic puritans kow-tow to the nobs!) WE do not share Mr. Kerman's moral values, and as he is not Beethoven we merely want to smack him when he is rude.

It used to be said that we study history for the lessons we can learn for the present: ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. But now that the music of the past occupies the centre-stage—with contemporary work getting the walk-on parts—perhaps we should reverse this, and ask how far the past can be illuminated by what happens today.