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.

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.

I met with James MacMillan to discuss his cantata Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993). The conversation, which took place at MacMillan's home in Glasgow on 30 November 2007, ranged far beyond that particular piece and lasted for over 90 minutes. Whilst the conversation has been edited to remove repetitions, I have endeavoured to represent MacMillan's comments accurately.

In 2014 composer, flutist and director of Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel, Cat Hope, sought to commission a work from Éliane Radigue. During discussions, Radigue proposed a collaborative composition with another composer, performer and lead interpreter of her acoustic work, Carol Robinson. The result was Radigue's first co-composed work, and the first work by Radigue for an Australian group. Robinson came to Australia to work directly with the Decibel ensemble for a nine-day development phase that culminated in a thirty-minute acoustic work, part of the OCCAM series, for flute, clarinet, percussion, viola and cello. Each OCCAM work is completely defined, and yet never exactly reproducible, because the particular interaction between sound, instrument, musician and acoustics requires constant adaptation. The process of developing the work, though extremely demanding, was fascinating and thoroughly rewarding because it obliges the performer to enter into a state of hyper acuteness, sensitivity and in some ways, belief. The musician is guided toward a level of awareness and reactivity that increases as the sound material itself is assimilated. It is never a question of replicating an event or sequence, but rather of understanding the elements that created the event and then allowing those elements to develop further. This article discusses the unique process involved in the elaboration of this new work and how it differs from the development of previous OCCAM pieces. It is written in the voices of both the commissioner, Cat Hope (main text), and the co-composer of the work, Carol Robinson (indented text in italics).

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.

This article discusses Nautilus (2022), a composition for solo bass flute created using machine-learning techniques and a Unity game engine. We consider the approaches we adopted and how they enhanced creativity and musicianship for those involved. We reflect on Unity's potential as a novel and flexible driver for the creation of a musical score in which traditional elements of compositional design are presented to a performer as a co-creator for interpretation and communication inside the act of musicking. Through this we offer insights into performer agency and how a performer decodes media, sound, images and AI through their instrument, personal skills and musical aesthetic. We describe how the notion of a music score was re-conceptualised, transforming our understanding of the activities of composition, collaboration and performance.

Christian Wolff, who turned 70 in March this year, is the last remaining member of the so-called New York School of Composers. Very briefly he studied with John Cage, and was exchanging thoughts with Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor from the age of 16 in 1950. Along with friends and colleagues Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, he began in the 1970s to draw upon musical ideas that reflected his social and political concerns in a more direct manner. The following is an extract of a much longer interview which took place during the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2002 where Christian Wolff was a featured composer. Wolff discusses his recent compositions, his attitude to writing for voice, and his approach to performance and to begin with, recording.

The 1921 orchestra score of Le Sacre du printemps, the first to be published, differs greatly from the original (1913) version. In a letter to an unidentified French correspondent, 9 January 1918, Stravinsky says that the printing of the first edition was interrupted by the war, and that he possesses only one copy of the proofs. A year later, answering a request by Felix Delgrange to perform the Sacre, the composer writes says

…105 musicians are required and you have only 80. Also, it is necessary to follow my markings. Furthermore, the only orchestra parts in existence are in my possession. (Letter of April, 1919)

The story of the composition of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony at the height of the Lady Macbeth affair (1935–6), its withdrawal at an advanced stage of rehearsal (avowedly because of the composer's dissatisfaction with the finale) and the subsequent proffering of the Fifth Symphony as “a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism“, is well known. But only since the recent re-emergence of the Fourth Symphony has it been possible to discover to what extent this work represents “the path not taken”, and to assess whether the jolt that his music suffered at this period was fundamentally beneficial, or harmful, or neither.

The German composer Dieter Schnebel was born in March 1930, in Lahr, Baden. He began serious piano studies at the age of 10, and made his first attempts at composition around the end of the war, in his mid-teens. His principal music studies took place at the Musik Hochschule, Freiburg from 1949 to 1952; having encountered the music of Hindemith in 1949, he became aware of Bartók, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School during the early 1950s, and studied at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where he came into contact with Krenek, Varèse, Adorno, Henze, Nono and Boulez.

Everyone Knows that several of Gustav Holst's early works are concerned with subject-matter derived from Indian mythology. The most significant, though by no means the only, examples are the operas Sita and Savitri, the cantata The Cloud Messenger, and the various settings of Hymns from the Rig Veda. His knowledge and use of that subject-matter, however, has received little critical appraisal. Conventional formulations such as that in John Vinton's Dictionary of 20th Century Music (‘his studies of Sanskrit … introduced him to Eastern thought’), themselves derived from Imogen Holst's biography of her father, have been allowed to stand unscrutinized. There has, in particular, been little or no discussion of the relationship between Holst's sources, compositional style, and creative achievement in these works – which constitute, after all, his first really personal contribution to European music. Yet these are vitally important considerations if the music of Holst's ‘Indian’ period is to be rescued from the picturesque. Just as important as the literary and philosophical aspects is the cultural context; a discussion of that will help to explain why Holst should have been looking towards India in the first place.

Ancient, ornately carved palaces in the midst of a megalopolis, the spirituality of delicate green Koryo celadon, an archaic traditional music as pungent (and delicious) as kimchi – once experienced, never forgotten. Add to these the city of Kyongju, called the ‘museum without walls’, the many reminders of a long history of suffering under Japanese oppression and the uninterrupted excellence of its poetry and visual arts, and one begins to feel Korea's special quality. The country is prosperous; education in all fields, including the arts, is given high priority. Contemporary life is vibrant and intense; the people possess a seemingly boundless capacity for hard work as well as for celebration, festivity, ceremony and mourning – and for music-making. Hardly surprising, then, that the compositional scene in the Republic of South Korea is booming, to say the least.

Heitor Villa-Lobos's musical output is very comprehensive. Nevertheless, he thought it useful or necessary, at some later stage, to incorporate certain pieces – in their original form or in transcription – into other compositions, apparently for lack of time to write a completely new work, or sheer laziness. Or, he found delight in teasing his listeners, friends and admirers, unless they discovered his hoax. The Brazilian composer-conductor Walter Burle-Marx (b. 1902), in a letter to me of 31 May 1981 from Caracas, Venezuela (and reproduced here by his kind permission), commented on this characteristic of Villa-Lobos

A typical example of Villa-Lobos's temperament and way of thinking concerns the Bachianas Brasileiras # 5.1 did the U.S premiere in New York at the World's Fair on May 4th, 1939 with the New York Philharmonic and Bidú Sayão, using the manuscript of Villa-Lobos. Later on, when I saw the manuscript again, there was a repeat sign on the first introductory measure in 5/4. I asked him why he did that and he replied that he felt that the introduction was too short. I asked why he didn't compose two different measures – he who had so much imagination – and he smiled and said: ‘To tell the truth, I felt lazy’. This was one of his faults; once a work was finished, he very rarely went back to polish it much less to change it.

It is the aim of the British Institute of Recorded Sound to preserve copies of all published, and some unpublished, records of music, speech, animal and other varieties of sound in a collection on lines similar to that of printed matter in the British Museum Library. So far as music is concerned, the present aim is to obtain copies of records as they are published and to rescue as many of those made since recording first began, irrespective of their current value. It is of course impossible to predict the degree of value of any particular record—as to its music, performance, recording, or documentary interest—and it is quite probable that many will share the fate of Dussek's piano sonatas in relation to those of his contemporaries Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It is fairly predictable however that records of Bartók, for instance, playing his own piano pieces will be of immense value for a very long time, in spite of the inferiority of the actual recording. But the Institute has no intention of forcing any kind of discrimination on the future—restriction is unavoidable, as with the Tate Gallery, only through an insufficiency of funds. Ideally its appetite must be gargantuan; classical and jive, romantic ballet and rock ‘n’ roll, Antonio's castanets and African drums, the voices of Flagstad, Norman Wisdom and Florence Foster Jenkins are all desired for its archives. Speech and music of the present day should be represented fully and impartially, and the future student be permitted to draw his own conclusions.

What can one say, with what words should one address Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky on his eighty-fifth birthday, a day for the greatest rejoicing both in his personal life and in his life as an artist? We must express infinite gratitude to him (but can it be expressed in words?), for it is essential that he should know that notwithstanding his world-wide recognition, he is, and always will be, both as a man and as a composer, one of the great mysteries of world culture, and in particular of Russian culture, a mystery that will live forever, that will always be subject to fresh interpretations and that will always be needed. His secret—which cannot really be explained—is first and foremost the secret of his genius, the mysterious unexpectedness and the marvel of his appearance in the music of Russia and the world. As Tolstoy said: “Genius is that which cannot be called anything else but genius!” Its basic characteristics, moreover, are unpredictability and self-evidence.

This year sees the centenary (on 1 May) of the birth of the composer Jón Leifs. Had it fallen just a few years earlier the occasion would have attracted virtually no attention outside his native Iceland, but over the past four years a series of CD recordings, mainly from the Swedish label BIS, has done much to establish Leifs as a figure of far more than local significance. His output included three string quartets, piano music, songs, choral works (both accompanied and unaccompanied) a sizeable number of short orchestral works, an organ concerto, oratorios and the first ever symphony composed by an Icelander. The creative personality emerging with each new recording is among the most radical and original of the 20th century and this article is intended as a short introduction to the music of this remarkable composer.

The 1950s was a particularly important decade for Peter Maxwell Davies. It was the period when he established the fundamental elements of his compositional technique; the decade in which he composed his first acknowledged works; and a time, coinciding with his emergence as a composer of substance, when he travelled to Darmstadt, Paris and Rome. It was also the period that witnessed the publication of two of his own articles, and the decade in which his interest in early music – particularly plainchant – and Indian classical music began to influence his own compositional thinking and resulting works.