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.

Bleak House Farm lies down a muddy track which leads off Heslington Lane, quite close to York's main golf course and a stone's throw from the grey concrete campus of the university. Here, in 1969, in a field more often than not unapproachable without Wellington boots, stood a dilapidated modern caravan just big enough for the occupant and his eight cats. The occupant, who kept halfcopied transparencies of music by himself and his teacher rolled up under the bed, was Vic Hoyland. His motive for such an existence was neither masochism nor romantic self indulgence, but extreme hardship. The cats – all related by vigorous in-breeding – had short legs and voracious appetites.

Howard skempton is a deeply serious composer, but his art is modest and makes no self-conscious effort to impress. Precisely because it is so natural the music seems to tell us a lot about the private person behind the notes. The music's dimensions are equally modest. Most of the piano pieces last little more than a minute or two, and they are ideal for domestic music-making, playing for one's own pleasure or to a friend.

Skempton was born in 1947. He studied composition privately with Cornelius Cardew with whom, together with Michael Parsons, he helped to found the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. Since 1974 he has composed vocal, accordion, and percussion pieces for the many concerts he has given with Michael Parsons. His largest work to date has been Chorales which was given its first performance in 1982 by the Merseyside Youth Orchestra.

The appearance of Shostakovich's Second Symphony on a gramophone record some time ago, and its public performance at a BBC symphony concert in London last October, marked its emergence from a period of over forty years of almost total neglect. Bearing the subtitle ‘To October: A symphonic Dedication’, it was composed in 1927 (two years after the highly successful First Symphony, which had established the composer's international reputation) in response to a commission from the State for a work to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. But while the score bears as its heading words from the Communist Manifesto, ‘Workers (Proletarians) of the World, Unite’, and the composer's avowed intention is ‘proletarian’, the musical idiom is often far removed from this. The symphony was given its first performance in Leningrad on the 6 November 1927, and as Dmitri Rabinovich, Shostakovich's Russian biographer, says in his book, “got a fairly good press but after a few performances disappeared from the repertoire”.

‘In the winter [of 1910–11 Stravinsky] went with Maurice Ravel to Varese, an Italian town not far from Como, found in a stationer's shop an exercise book and, tempted by its presentation and the quality of the paper, he and Ravel bought one copy each.’ For the next two years Stravinsky carried this book from ‘The Lindens’, a pension in Clarens, to Monte Carlo, Paris, Venice, to his summer home in Ustilug in Russian Volhynia and finally back to the Hotel du Châtelard in Clarens, and in it he wrote the first draft of The Rite of Spring.

• John Ireland Symposium Mike Smith

• Ligeti's Laments Mike Searby

Per Nørgård makes an improbable Grand Old Man. For a start, he's not nearly old enough; though he was 65 on 13 July this year, you wouldn't imagine to look at him that he was much past his mid-forties. Nørgård, moreover, cuts no establishment figure: he is a large, imposing man, with a thatch of reddish-blonde hair splashed on top of a rugby-player's frame that suggests he is about to explode into action at any moment. But Grand Old Man he already is: with the deaths of his teachers Vagn Holmboe (last September, at the age of 88) and Finn Høffding (this March, at an Olympian 98), Nørgård is now the senior figure in Danish music; there are older composers, of course, but none of his international standing. He doesn't act the part, though: his gestures are gentle, his conversation calm. Indeed, he talks about himself and his music with a quiet conviction that draws in the listener like a youngster listening to a bedtime story.

The feeling of nature I think is what I like so much in Grieg's best things. You have it too & I think we all 3 have something in common.

Delius to Grainger, 10 June 1907.

Spring always means for me a longing for Norway.

Delius to Grainger, January 1914.

A ‘Norwegian Cuckoo’? Well perhaps not Norwegian literally, but certainly figuratively. Perhaps, as we shall see, nothing more than an accidental cadence. Delius thought so, even if Grieg didn't; and it was probably Grainger who inadvertently acted as the go-between.

Martin Arnold is an experimental composer currently residing in Toronto, Canada. His unique approach to composition originates in the close relationship that he developed with Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous while Arnold was a doctoral student at the University of Victoria. Martin Arnold's desire to create music both familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, generates paradoxical listening experiences that reside on the edges of things. In this article, the author explores a number of these edges and meeting places, especially as they occur within the composer's very singular string quartet, Contact; Vault.

Beethoven's famous letter to ‘The Immortal Beloved’ still remains a central reference point for our image of his life and music. Gerald Barry's 2007 composition for bass voice and ensemble – simply entitled Beethoven – sets this text in its entirety, continuing an engagement with Beethoven's own words and presenting a striking juxtaposition of language and music. This article explores the ways in which Barry at times underpins and in other places undercuts the apparent meaning of the words, and how he presents a reading of the letter that is clearly alive to its inherent self-contradictions. Characteristically, Barry brings together a number of highly expressive and strongly contrasted musical characters in this work; an examination of aspects of his compositional language illustrates how material is propagated and form articulated, and explores the way in which these techniques interact in the creation of an expressive and emotionally charged whole.

It seems improbable that the Tallis Scholars can have given their first concert 40 years ago: while the rest of us have crumbled, their conductor, Peter Phillips, hardly seems older now that he did when he founded the group. New music has been an increasingly important part of their repertoire over the decades, rubbing shoulders with the Renaissance stalwarts, and so it was gratifying that their anniversary concert should feature two world premières and one first London hearing. The venue on 7 March could hardly have been more imposing: the singers were stationed under the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the audience radiating out from them towards three of the four points of the compass; and it seemed that most of the British musical establishment had come to pay homage and say thanks.

I first bought a subscription to Tempo because I thought I ‘ought’ to do better at keeping up with contemporary music; but I continue to subscribe because I find it the most interesting reading on music I know. Informative, even inspiring, and my collection of CDs has grown in ways I never expected.

On a gloomy winter's night in Dalston what could be better than Kammerklang at Café OTO? Out of the cold and into a packed house – standing room only for many of us, and sauna-like levels of humidity – for an evening in which an audio-visual piece about bells by Christine Sun Kim and a new string quartet by Lisa Illean frame the main event, two new pieces by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller.

THE MILKEN ARCHIVE OF AMERICAN JEWISH MUSIC. Naxos American Classics 8.559400 through 8.559425 and upwards.

• Nicholas Maw's ‘Sophie's Choice’ Paul Conway

• Morton Feldman Colin Clarke

• Richard Ayres Peter Reynolds

• Elinor Remick Warren Bret Johnson

• Thomas Adès Paul Conway

• Further reviews Peter Palmer, Colin Clarke, Guy Rickards, Paul Conway, Calum MacDonald, Bret Johnson

Michael Berkeley's choral and operatic successes have tended to obscure his accomplishments in the field of chamber music, which include a serialist String Trio (1978), two String Quartets and a Clarinet Quintet from the 1980s and the string quartet Torque and Velocity (1997). His latest essay in the genre, Abstract Mirror, for string quintet, was premièred on 11 February 2003 at Bishopsgate Hall by the Chilingirian Quartet, with cellist Stephen Orton. The work was a joint commission by the players and the City Music Society.

Although much of the best of Britten's unperformed early music has come to light since his death, there are still a number of substantial works to be discovered. The latest to emerge – appropriately premièred at the Royal College of Music where Britten was a student – is the ballet score Plymouth Town, which he composed during his summer holidays in 1931, following his first year at the College. The idea for a ballet was suggested by Violet Alford, an authority on folklore and particularly Basque dancing, who in July 1931 was a fellow lodger in the house in Bayswater where Britten had a room.

Sur Incises, first performed in 1998, is the most recent major work by Pierre Boulez, but there has been very little published writing discussing it, although Boulez himself discussed the piece in a lecture released on DVD. Like many of his recent works, Sur Incises reworks existing material – taking the short piano piece Incises and expanding it into a large-scale work for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists. This article examines how the gestures, harmonies and even the instrumentation of the earlier piece are ‘refracted’ – presented in multiple overlaid versions as if a prism had revealed the possibilities inherent in the original material. Sur Incises is discussed with reference to common concerns in Boulez's work since the 1970s – its use of quasi-thematic ‘signals’ to mark structure, its use of luxurious harmonic fields and chord multiplication, its virtuosic toccata material, and its use of the SACHER hexachord.