This year's Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music were plugged-in, wired-up, mixed-down, line-out. Scarcely a main-stage concert wasn't amplified, at the very least. More often, new works synthesised spatialised sound design, video material, lighting and electronics in high-tech, high-concept performances.

• Los Angeles: John Adams's ‘The Gospel According to the Other Mary’ Michael Palmese

• London, Royal Opera House: Judith Weir's ‘Miss Fortune’ Paul Conway

• London, Coliseum: Detlev Glanert's ‘Caligula’ Guy Rickards

• London, Barbican Theatre: Glass's ‘Einstein on the Beach’ Keith Potter

• Birmingham, Symphony Hall: Jonathan Harvey's ‘Weltethos’ Arnold Whittall

• Further reports from Huddersfield, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham and London Paul Conway, Tim Mottershead, Peter Palmer, Jill Barlow

BERNARD STEVENS: Piano Trio op.3; Sonata for violin and piano op.1; Trio for horn, violin and piano op.38; Fantasia on a theme of Dowland for violin and piano op.23; Improvisation for solo violin op.48a. The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble – Kenneth Sillito (vln), Stephen Orton (vlc), Hamish Milne (pno), Timothy Brown (hn). Albany Records TROY 572.

The Summers Night Project is an ongoing composer-mentoring programme established in 2018 by musicians Cat Hope and Gabriella Smart, with the support of the Perth-based new music organisation Tura New Music. The project aims to support and mentor emerging Australian female and gender minority composers to create new compositions for performance, with the aim of growing the gender diversity of composers in music programmes across Australia. Three composers were chosen from a national call for submissions, and works were performed by an ensemble consisting of members from the Decibel and Soundstream new music ensembles. Three new works were workshopped, recorded then performed on a short tour of Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia in July 2018. The project takes its name and inspiration from Australian feminist Anne Summers, author of the ground-breaking examination of women in Australia's history Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) and was inspired by her 2017 Women's Manifesto. This article examines the rationale for such a project, the processes and results of the project itself, and plans for its future.

Generally, I find Alfred Schnittke's music rewarding and refreshing; however, I cannot help treating certain aspects of it with some suspicion. The elements which form the basis of my doubts are cogently summed up by Hugh Collins Rice:

Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs…and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formations.

John Croft's ‘Composition is Not Research’ (TEMPO Vol. 69, No. 272 (2015), pp. 6–11) argues that, ‘the very idea that musical composition is a form of research is a category error’ (p. 6). My response argues that Croft's analysis is borne of a widespread, misguided and essentialist attempt to reduce all research to the paradigm of scientific method, and that he accepts this paradigm uncritically. Whilst asserting that ‘composition is research’ does not entail a category mistake (as the whole point about research is that it is not delimited in any way), assuming that all research must be reducible to the scientific paradigm of method does entail the requisite reification to constitute such a mistake. The imposition of this reductionist paradigm has a distorting impact on the Humanities more generally and, whilst these distortions are particularly acute with musical composition, that is no reason to single it out for persecution. I argue that where the tenets of scientific method are adopted outside of science, this constitutes, more often than not, superficial pseudo-science (or scientism), whereby the tenets of scientific method are fetishized and applied divorced from the complete scientific method and scientific objectives. I conclude that the Humanities would do better to develop its own paradigms – paradigms that are better suited and intrinsic to its respective disciplines.

Laurence Crane's music is often described as experimental or considered as a continuation of the English experimental tradition. In this first extended examination of Crane's music it is proposed that, instead of relying upon associations and aesthetic alignments, the music might be considered as experimental through a particularly experimental approach to performance. After a brief overview of Crane's output his position as a composer is considered within the context of the experimental music tradition. This tradition is then considered in relation to performance practice, both historical and contemporary. A selection of Crane's music is examined in the light of that practice, whilst aspects of the composer's approaches to tonality, instrumentation, form and notation are also highlighted.

An important factor in understanding the two kinds of presentation is that – seen historically – one or other has at different times moved into the foreground; moreover, that in connexion with the development of music and as a consequence of the continually progressing ‘conquest of the pitch-domain’, a mixing of the two kinds of presentation was arrived at. Here Webern above all follows Adler, who speaks in his book Der Stil in der Musik (1911) of ‘immensely multifarious intermediate and transitional stages from homophonic to polyphonic voice-leading’, of their mixing, of a ‘to and fro rich in variety, … continual exchange of the two basic kinds, homo – and polyphony’ (p. 246). As has already been said, Webern, going beyond this, assumes that the mixing up is caused by a tendency, on the part of the two kinds of presentation, ‘mutually (to) permeate each other more and more’ (Lecture IV).

The overriding picture that emerges from the scrutiny of the sketches for Peter Maxwell Davies's Third Symphony (1984) is the remarkable insight it affords in demonstrating a highly proficient composer in total control of his material. He is the consummate workman: diligent, methodical, economical. Indeed, his rather cerebral approach can be construed as objective – purely in the sense of the detached and calculating nature of the sketches, seemingly free as they are from spontaneous outpourings of instinctive musical inspiration. Nevertheless, Davies's method of composing endows the overall project with a sense of cogent direction and powerful meaning. Such discernment is not easily achieved, and has to be carefully planned early on in the work's genesis; certainly, the Third Symphony – a prodigious piece of architecture lasting almost one hour – is enriched by its preliminary working-out. Furthermore, Davies's employment of precompositional determinants, such as Magic Squares and pitch and durational matrices, is so integral to the overall construction of the piece that there exists a susbstantial volume of material, soley devoted to precompositional workings for the work.

The house is tucked away behind a corner of the road. Once you have passed the gate, the entrance lane, three sleepy dogs, the hall, a spacious living room and the doors to the terrace, you are face to face with the most magnificent Tuscan landscape imaginable. The view of the hills is unspoilt, as is the silence around. It's the ideal place for Luciano Berio to create the colourful, imaginative sound-world that has made him, at the age of 70, one of the most popular and admired composers of today.

Anyone bold enough to claim that the British compositional scene is dominated at present by a mainstream whose principal godfathers are Tippett and Birtwistle might just as well extend the reductive flourish by observing that an alternative duo – Britten and Maxwell Davies – not only have less in common with each other but are also less influential, less ‘significant’. Despite obvious differences of style, Tippett and Birtwistle share a basic predisposition to internationalism and modernism. By contrast, Britten's resistance to modernism and Davies's aspiration to classicism combine with a more direct response from both composers to local, if not exactly ‘national’ features, and, by the criteria for mainstream membership given above, this means that they belong on the margins of contemporary musical life in Britain, not at the centre.

French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

This article offers an analysis of the Second Piano Sonata ‘being and non-being create each other’, op. 82 (1990–91) by Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008), the first work in which Radulescu applied the spectral techniques he had developed in his music since the late 1960s to that most apparently unpromising of instrumental media for this type of approach: the solo, equal-tempered piano. And it has a quite specific aim: to analyse Radulescu's sonata in a descriptive language as close as possible to that used by the composer himself.

When a Western musician thinks of Israel, the immediate association is of incessant political conflict and terrorism, not the country's rich cultural life. Yet, for a state that has endured one terrorist outrage after another over the last four years, Israel's thriving contemporary music scene — a part of classical music events, blossoming with over 2,300 classical concerts a year — is an astounding feat. In March 2002, while biweekly suicide attacks ended the lives of over 120 Israeli civilians, concert halls were unbelievably full despite the fear, or perhaps just because of it, as a constructive escapism. A year later, still under shaky political and economic conditions, Avigail Arnheim, the director of music events at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and Dan Yuhas, the newly-elected chair of the Israel Composers' League (and the music director of the Israel Contemporary Players) initiated preparations for three concurrent festivals of contemporary music in October 2004. A Western musician, not knowing the details, would think that they were planning events for Berlin and Munich audiences, and not for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem listeners.

This article is an interview with the Franco-Slovenian composer, conductor and trombonist Vinko Globokar, translated, edited and introduced by the author. It offers an overview of Globokar's musical development and a consideration of his artistic position, which straddles the worlds of composition and improvisation. Globokar's music combines complex organisation with an interest in non-hierarchical and improvisatory elements. He has always refused to pit the avant-garde claims of contemporary music against those of free jazz, his music embracing aspects of both, as well as of traditional Balkan musics. His genre-defying approach remains better known in continental Europe than in the UK or North America, and the present text is a contribution to the limited bibliography on Globokar in English.

This article considers the ‘representation of decay’ in selected concert works by the Australian composer Cat Hope. It draws on a mixed-method research methodology, comparing the conceptual aspects of Hope's oeuvre with analyses of studio and live recordings of Hope's work and discussing how such ideas of ‘decay’ may play out in the sonic world. Two forms of spectral analysis are employed: firstly the analysis of spectral parameters roughness, noisiness, brightness, pitch, and centroid, and secondly a visualisation of the music as a spectrogram. The data for the spectral analyses are derived from Alexander Harker's spectral descriptor tools for MaxMSP which record a value for each parameter every 25 milliseconds. At times, values are normalised within a range of 0 and 1, as representative of how listeners experience parametrical changes (i.e. dynamics, in relative terms rather than absolutes in relation to other sounds in the work). Importantly, perception of noisiness is more acute at frequencies in which the auditory critical bands are wider, below 250 Hz (roughly below middle C), precisely the upper range specified by Hope to define instruments suitable for the Australian Bass Orchestra.

The music of Jakob Ullmann (b. 1958) is notable for its protracted structural stasis and delicacy; its fusion of rigorously engineered notational systems, abstract graphical elements and Byzantine iconography; and – above all – its unrelenting quietness. This article offers a rare view into Ullmann's compositional practices, with a specific focus upon the role of fragility in the work. Exploring this concept of fragility as a musical feature, this article considers a number of Ullmann's works from the perspectives of the compositions and their scores, the performance and the agency of performers and, finally, how audiences may listen to this fragility. The article concludes with a consideration of the importance of fragility to Ullmann's oeuvre, and of how it might help us to further understand his music.