Giacinto Scelsi was a master improviser. He created hundreds of hours of music, which he originally recorded on tape and then had transcribed for various instruments. These transcriptions were made in collaboration with various musicians: the majority by Vieru Tosati, but also Alvin Curran, Sergio Caffaro and myself.

Cornelius Cardew's 193–page Treatise is the longest and most elaborate piece of Graphic Music ever made. Although it was intended for improvisation and realization, using as many or as few pages as required, and with no fixed rules of interpretation, the piece can be regarded as a graphic construction inspired by music – and with ‘music’, in the broadest sense, as its subject matter. It was influenced by the philosophy of Frege and Wittgenstein, and in particular the latter's exhaustive treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which not only inspired the title but almost certainly the composer's economical approach to this endeavour and the rigorous development of his material. It was composed from 1963 to 67.

Sándor Veress, who was born in 1907 at Kolozsvár, a major town of Transylvania (now Cluj, Rumania), studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with Kodály for composition, Bartók for piano, and Lajtha for folksong research. From the age of twenty he was a prolific composer, of marked individuality—already strongly evident in the works of his first period, written in a very distinctive neo-classical contrapuntal idiom with strong national inflexions. By 1939 he had produced an impressive body of works, including two powerful and concentrated string quartets, a series of witty chamber-music sonatinas (1931–33) and the more expansive Violin Sonata No.2 (1939), a Partita for small orchestra (1936), the lyrical and poetic two-movement Violin Concerto (1937–39), a ‘Transylvanian Cantata’ for mixed chorus (1935), anda ballet The Magic Flute(1937).

We would do the interview in the circle. It was clearing-up time after yet another rehearsal in the Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, and I was following a slow-moving John Cage of 78 years up the stairs as he embarassingly held doors for me and explained the tight schedule he was bound by. He has now visited the U.K. three times in one year, taking in the Huddersfield, Almeida, and Glasgow's Musica Nova festivals, all in the middle of his usual jet-setting around the world which occupies the greater part of his year. With such tight schedules and a time-consuming specialised diet, it is incredible that he grants interviews at all. His usual answer – based, as ever, in his infamous non-intention – is: ‘because people ask me to!’ Non-intentionality has been his basic aesthetic position since at least the 1950s, and as I found out, he's still finding fresh nuances there. At least when he's got the time to sit down at his desk. Why does he do it?

It seems clear that, by a certain point in the twentieth century, the roles of composer and performer had become increasingly separated, but when we think of composers such as JS Bach, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, we are reminded that the idea of the musician as composer-performer is not new. Today, we can see an increasing number of musicians running a double life as composer and performer. What does it mean to be a composer-performer in the twenty-first century? How does the relationship of compositions to their performances change when the composer is the performer?

Close examination of John Adams's oeuvre reveals that symmetry is one of the predominant features of his music. Three common types of symmetry are encountered in Adams's works: reflection, translation and rotation. This article investigates these symmetries and tracks their development throughout Adams's compositional career. An analysis of selected works from the 1970s (China Gates and Phrygian Gates), 1980s (Grand Pianola Music and Fearful Symmetries) and 1990s (the Violin Concerto and Century Rolls) highlights the most pervasive symmetry in each decade and shows a shift from preconceived overarching symmetries that frame entire musical structures to smaller-level symmetries that affect the music at a level of phrase and motivic structure.

The techniques and aesthetic of Xenakis's music have been widely discussed in books and articles—many by the composer himself. These issues belong to the ‘outside time’ characteristics of music which Xenakis has defined in his article ‘Towards a Metamusic’ (TEMPO 93). So far, however, there has been little or no detailed discussion of the ‘inside time’ aspect of his music, namely the problems relating to its performance, although it is generally known that many of his works—especially those where solo players are involved, such as Nomos Alpha, Mikka, Eonta, Herma, Evryali, Synaphai-Connexites—are exceptionally difficult to play. These problems are important and must be solved not only for the sake of satisfactory performances of Xenakis's music, but also because they raise wider questions concerning the further exploration of instrumental technique.

At the Venice Festival this year the first performance was given of Stravinsky's Monumentum pro Gesualdo Venosa ad CD Annum. This consists of three of Gesualdo's five-part madrigals, ‘re-composed for instruments’ by Stravinsky. The madrigals he has chosen are ‘Asciugate i begli occhi’ (Book V, No. 15), ‘Ma tu, cagion di quella’ (Book V, No. 18), and ‘Belta poi che t'assenti’ (Book VI, No. 2). Stravinsky's full orchestra for the work consists of two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and strings without double basses, but he uses no trumpets or trombones in the first madrigal, and no horns or strings in the second.

Barry Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987, a few hours after the first performance of his new chamber work, ARC. His hectic life-style with its incessant demands had burned him out. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but the real cause was exhaustion from years of overwork as a composer, teacher, concert organizer, ‘ghost’ writer, and pioneer in the dissemination of electro-acoustic music in this country. He was 52 years old and, sadly, just beginning to be recognized as a composer of international stature.

When in 1957 Igor Markevitch and Georges Auric commissioned the 32-year-old Pierre Boulez, fresh from the success of his Marteau sans maître, to write a work for the Société des concerts Lamoureux, the result was an eightminute symphonic torso, Doubles, whose gripping intensity, heroic utterance, and vivid orchestral imagery marked it as potentially one of the composer's most important creative efforts. Announced at its Paris première on 16 March 1958 as the beginning of an ambitious work-inprogress, it was not heard again until January 1964, when the first ten minutes of a revision entitled Figures Doubles Prismes were presented by the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Basle. Instead of adding the expansive second stage of Doubles – which had been mapped out and in part actually composed in particell – the revision opened up the existing first stage by interpolating new episodes of contrasting character. Though the plan of the revision called for a total duration of about 30 minutes (toward which an additional five minutes of music were composed and introduced at the Hague by Het Residentieorkest in 1968), a shift of career focus by the composer in 1971 to conducting and electronic research brought progress on this and several other major projects to an indefinite halt. As a consequence, the intended but still unrealized overall shape of Figures Doubles Prismes, as well as of its forerunner, Doubles, can be appreciated, at least for the time being, only from manuscripts on deposit at Switzerland's Paul Sacher Foundation.

James Tenney, who has been called ‘America's most famous unknown composer’, exerted a lasting influence not only in the artistic fields of music, painting, theatre, and film, but also in the scientific realms of psychology, electroacoustics, and computer technology. The fact that Tenney's active presence can be charted across several areas of study reflects his own multifarious interests and provides an opportunity to examine how individuals in different disciplines reciprocally affected the composer.

Stockhausen's idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs, and the vigour with which he expressed them in his compositional processes, have sometimes been an obstacle to both musicians and audiences in engaging with his music. I explore the extent to which the ability to appreciate Stockhausen's music is predicated on a sympathy with his spiritual world view. I pose a broad view of Stockhausen's spirituality, not reliant on theism, through drawing on three key sources: the composer's own commentary on spirituality and its connections with his serialist compositional techniques; Rudolf Otto's notions of an intrinsically human awareness of ‘the holy’; and the connections of mathematics with human truth drawn by Alain Badiou. I argue that a broader understanding of Stockhausen's spirituality enables a pathway into his music that can be shared by both theists and atheists, and that this can produce a rich fodder for each in their curiosity about human place in the world.

Cat Hope's compositional practice is guided by a belief that music is inherently socially situated and can therefore be used as a tool for change. Through her 2019 opera Speechless Hope contributes to public discourse around the treatment of detainees in Australian offshore processing centres and engages more broadly with issues of nationality, human rights, displacement and the agency of voiceless minorities. This article demonstrates the way in which Hope presents identity in abstraction and complicates the binary of the self and the collective through musical acts of empathy. In doing so, she pioneers a new model which affords composers the ability to present progressive social arguments, crucial to a global political climate in desperate need of a recalibrated perspective of identity.

In the realm of art music, Leo Brouwer (1939-) is widely considered as the most significant living composer for the guitar. Since the latter part of the 20th century, students of the guitar at most, if not all, recognized music institutions have increasingly sought to perform Brouwer's works. Correspondingly, at the South African College of Music (University of Cape Town) respected instructors like Elspeth Jack, Neefa van der Schyff, and others, have over many years consistently and devotedly incorporated Brouwer's guitar literature into their teaching programmes. Cape Town's prized composer-conductor Alan Stephenson has similarly developed a keen interest in Brouwer's large-scale works, inspiring in 1998 a memorable rendition of Brouwer's acclaimed Elegiaco Concerto, performed by the talented soloist Christiaan Van der Vyver and the University of Cape Town Orchestra. In line with this, one of Brouwer's underlying goals has been to create works that are accessible to players of varying standards of performance. As a consequence, young, inexperienced, moderate, advanced as well as top internationally-acclaimed virtuosic players have all found some measure of contentment in performing Brouwer's guitar works.

James MacMillan was 50 years old on 16 July 2009 and his birthday was celebrated by musical institutions not just in Britain, but internationally. As a composer and conductor in residence for the BBC Philharmonic he led performances of his Symphony No.3: Silence and The World's Ransoming. The Royal Northern College of Music staged a three-day celebration of his work while The Sixteen toured his music under conductor Harry Christophers. His recent St John Passion was performed in Berlin and Amsterdam by the London Symphony Orchestra and in Rotterdam concerts of his music were given by the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra and the Hilliard Ensemble. The widespread regard for MacMillan's music evidenced by these performances is the culmination of a steady rise in popularity, undisputedly catalyzed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra première of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. In a 1993 Tempo article on MacMillan, music critic Stephen Johnson describes the premiere thus: ‘there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented’.

Peter Bürger's critique of the historical avant garde (in Theory of the Avant Garde) accounts for its ineffectual nature as a political movement because of its relationship with institutions. He argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology, and as a facet of the understanding of the ‘historicity of aesthetic categories’. The influence of institutions on music since 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant garde. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘exform’ re-conceives the avant garde as outside of institutions and an idea of ‘progress’ that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. He frames the task of the avant-garde artist as giving energy to ‘waste’, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to ‘bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible’. This article explores the exform with respect to the work of the British composer Chris Newman and the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the present.

EG: Analyzing Pli selon pli, I went to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle and studied your sketches. There were some astonishing findings. As an example, let us look at the vocal line in Improvisation I sur Mallarmé. I wanted to take a restricted material and investigate it, and I wanted to find out how this vocal line was generated. If we look at these music examples: First, here are the pitches of the vocal line, ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hu,’, etc. [Example 1, my notation, EG.]

Among composers born in the 1950s, who witnessed the decline of the post-war avant-garde – together with its most cherished principle, integral serialism – the Finn Magnus Lindberg has produced some of the most challenging responses. It is tempting to attach considerable significance to Lindberg's national origins. Born in 1958, he belongs to a particularly vital generation of Finnish composers whose output extends from traditional symphonic forms to experimental creations involving electroacoustic and computer technology. On the one hand, they have benefitted from the example of composers (such as Aulis Sallinen) who emerged from Sibelius's shadow not only by founding a strong operatic tradition, but also by generating their own brand of orchestral music. On the other, several of the younger generation have continued the practice of studying abroad, though without sacrificing their independence from the European mainstream.