London, Barbican: Henze's ‘Scorribanda Sinfonica’ Malcolm Miller

Huddersfield: Contemporary Music Festival, 2006 Paul Conway

London: White, Smith and Hinton Martin Anderson

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Lachenmann John Wheatley

California, Napa: Anders Hillborg's ‘Arietta Quartet’ Jeff Dunn

London: Finnish premières Martin Anderson

London, Warehouse: Finnissy's ‘Back to Earth’ Jill Barlow

London, Barbican: Pintscher and Fedele Malcolm Miller

The not inconsiderable literature on Cardew frequently gives a view of him (merely) as a ‘man of ideas’, rather than as a composer of music whose qualities need no moral support from their conceptual infrastructure, and which may be judged on the same level as any music by composers less concerned than he was with the nature and status of themselves and their work.

The world première of Jörg Widmann's new opera Babylon, conducted by Kent Nagano at the Bayerische Staatsoper, on 27 October 2012, was an evening to remember, for both the spectacular production and the musical performances. It began with a poignant announcement from the stage that Widmann had dedicated the performance in gratitude to the memory of his teacher, Hans Werner Henze, who had died that very morning in Dresden at the age of 86. One's thoughts turned to Henze's own wonderful operatic oeuvre, especially The Bassarids, which shared with Babylon an interest in ancient myth and pastiche. Yet curiously, it was a totally different postmodern influence on Widmann that seemed more evident here: that of another mentor, Wolfgang Rihm.

Stephen Dodgson (born in London, 1924) is not so much a neglected composer as a quintessentially English one, with a quizzical sense of humour, who has never really courted a mass audience. He is often described as ‘a performer's composer’, responding to commissions from colleagues and prominent artists connected with the Royal College of Music, where he taught harmony to, among others, guitarist John Williams back in the 1950s. His connexion also with Julian Bream led to his lifelong love-affair with the guitar, despite the fact that Dodgson never played the instrument himself. His resulting two Guitar Concertos (1959 and 1972) gained instant international recognition. At Dodgson's 80th Birthday celebration concert at the Royal Academy of Music on 29 February, Head of Guitar Studies Michael Lewin said in his introduction that: ‘no single composer who is a non-guitarist has contributed in such a major way to the guitar repertoire, and in such varied genres’.

This article considers the nature of the relationship between composers and musicologists and explores the aesthetic roots and ideas of my 5th String Quartet, Dancers on a Plane, which has recently been the subject of a musicological study.

In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that ‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period’. Composers should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation.

In response to the letter from Styra Avins (Tempo, January 2003), I am grateful to stand so fascinatingly corrected with regard to the (poorly documented?) aspect of US cultural history in question.

A considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.

The German composer Michael Maierhof took a curious and unusual path to becoming a professional composer, performer and concert organiser, one that gives him a unique perspective on the German art music scene. This interview with Maierhof took place on 17 January 2020 in Maierhof's apartment in Hamburg, Germany and forms part of my research into the artistic and socio-economic motivations that composers and artistic directors employ when utilizing a conductor. The interview explores his personal history, compositional techniques, and perspective on the course of contemporary musical history before going on to consider his views on conductor's responsibilities and their role in contemporary music.

There is a considerable imbalance between the presence of the music of Italian composer Pierluigi Billone in contemporary musical life and its presence in other media. The composer, now over 60 and based in Vienna since 2004, has appeared regularly on most of the major platforms for contemporary music, yet his music is only rarely reflected upon in print. This article attempts for the first time to illuminate some central aspects of his music, touching specifically on his understanding of Klang,1 on his structural and formal strategies and on the significance of the ritual and the corporeal in his oeuvre.

The rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.

From the moment Schoenberg saw the need to use the designations Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, the issue of differentiating material in complex post-tonal scores has been significant. It has formal and textural connotations, and it relates directly to the experience of listening to this music.

A small group of composers and performers are collaborating orally/aurally on the creation of experimental music that eschews written scores (‘living scores’). By charting the overlaps between working methods and relationships – both social and musical – this article endeavours to shed light on how these practices rub against standard modes of documentation, transmission, scholarship and performance. The article begins by mapping out of the orally transmitted collaborative practices of four composers – Cassandra Miller, Pascale Criton, Éliane Radigue and me – as documented through interviews with prominent performer-collaborators such as Deborah Walker, Silvia Tarozzi, Juliet Fraser and Cat Hope. A guiding metaphor frames these practices as gardens and highlights shared thematic concepts such as extended time, hospitality, note-taking and responsibility.