It is the aim of the British Institute of Recorded Sound to preserve copies of all published, and some unpublished, records of music, speech, animal and other varieties of sound in a collection on lines similar to that of printed matter in the British Museum Library.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.

With Ada Sketches, for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and percussion, Mesmerism, for solo piano and chamber orchestra, and Calculus of the Nervous System, for large orchestra, in 2011 the young British composer Emily Howard completed a triptych of works in which she drew decisively on the life and thoughts of Ada Lovelace for inspiration. Today, Lovelace is recognized as a pioneer of 19th-Century mathematics, who in her lifetime attempted to bring together art and mathematics in Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. She was convinced of the power of mesmerism and believed that there was a possible mathematical calculation for the human nervous system. This article shows how Emily Howard took up and developed musically these central threads of Lovelace's work in her ‘Lovelace Trilogy’.

With Shostakovich's Twelfth Quartet, Op. 133, completed in 1968 and published this year (why the delay?), the contemporary problem stands on its head, on and off, for close on thirty minutes—if, that is to say, we take the reactions of some of the most interesting members of our musical culture into account (composers, advanced and conservative, critics, musical music lovers); and without reactions, without music's social situation, there wouldn't be any problem anyway: the Grosse Fuge was absolutely unproblematic before it was repeatedly played, and some of it understood. But that was, has been, the contemporary problem standing on its feet—chronically advanced music: in advance, that is to say, not only of its own time, but of successive later eras, with the result that we still don't altogether understand the work (as I call it), or the movement (as others call it)—or I don't anyway; why does it end so abruptly? All I get in reply to my question is my own musical depression: people don't even notice that it does end abruptly.

• London, Barbican: Alexander Goehr's ‘When Adam Fell’ Paul Conway

• London, Barbican: Thomas Adès's ‘Polaris’ Robert Stein

• University of Manchester: Philip Grange's ‘Ghosts of Great Violence’ Paul Conway

• Manchester University – Psappha 20th anniversary concert Tim Mottershead

• Birmingham, Symphony Hall: Cecilia McDowall's ‘Seventy Degrees Below Zero’ Paul Conway

• London, ENO: John Adams's ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ Robert Stein

• London, Barbican: Rebecca Saunders's ‘Still’ Paul Conway

• Chichester University: ‘New Music Chi’ John Wheatley

• St Mary's Church, Shrewsbury: John Joubert's Cello Concerto Paul Conway

• London, St. Giles Cripplegate: Jericho House's ‘The Tempest’ Jill Barlow

JACKSON: Organ Works (includes Sonatas 1–4, Toccata, Chorale and Fugue, 3 Pieces, Eclogue, Suite Montrealaise, Ballade, 5 Preludes on English Hymn Tunes, Exultet, Diversion for Mixtures, Intrada, Recit and Allegro, Scherzetto, Scherzo Amabile, Fantasia Argenti, Improvisation, Impromptu and other pieces). Francis Jackson (organs of York Minster, Blackburn and Lincoln Cathedrals). Priory PRCD 930 (4-CD set)

The demise of the Symphony is frequently announced, yet easily refuted by the quality of contemporary works bearing that title. Many recent examples have been written by British composers – Anthony Powers's Second, James MacMillan's Third, David Matthews's Fifth and Peter Maxwell Davies's Seventh, for example. To this distinguished list must be added Julian Anderson's Symphony. His four previous orchestral works contain sufficient structural ingenuity and intellectual rigour to make the cogency of his new piece no great surprise, yet it also offers some of Anderson's most lyrical as well as intricate writing.

During these summer months the New York Public Library has been holding an exhibition at the Research Library of the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, of manuscripts, drafts, annotations, letters, photographs, posters, objets, objets d'art, and other memorabilia selected from Stravinsky's legacy, and lent by his widow. The exhibition is unprecedented with respect to the collection of objects on display—since, for one thing, it is presumably only after so public a figure's demise that an assortment of this kind becomes open to the possibility of being thus exhibited—although a number of items had been familiar in published form. It is also, I conjecture, the first in a potential succession of exhibitions (depending, primarily, upon the eventual location of, and time at which, the entire legacy of these materials may become, as is to be hoped, in the most positive sense, public property), and it was mounted in conjunction with a Stravinsky Festival celebrating the 90th anniversary of the composer's birth.

These letters and sketches of letters which the curator of the Ives Collection at Yale University, Mr. John Kirkpatrick, has been kind enough to allow us to copy give the history of a warm and inspiring friendship with Charles Ives. It started around 1924, when Mr. Clifton J. Furness, a music teacher at the Horace Mann High School in New York City, where I was a student, introduced me to him. From what I can remember, we went to Ives's house by Gramercy Park on a dark, rainy Sunday afternoon, and stepped into a cheery, old-fashioned interior, discussing excitedly modern music all afternoon. After this, I met Ives occasionally, sometimes when he invited me to join Mrs. Ives and him in their box at the Saturday afternoon Boston Symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall, or at Katherine Ruth Heyman's loft in a building that no longer exists, on Third Avenue and 10th Street huddling under the El, or later at his house on East 74th Street opposite the Mannes School.

Richarid Emsley's relatively small but vital body of work has perhaps not received its just deserts, either in terms of frequency of performances or attention from the world of commissioning and publishing organizations. The primary reason for this, I believe, is an all-too-common one: his work is not as readily categorizable as that of many other young composers active in this country at present. Keith Potter implies as much in the only other article published to date on Emsley's work. Potter is much concerned with a supposed division between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in contemporary music. I believe that to be something of a red herring in this context—functioning in many cases as no more than a way of efficiently marketing, under the ‘designer label’ of postmodernism, much that lies in the uncertain territory between ‘music about music’ (which after all goes back at least to Stravinsky) and lack of imagination manifested as pastiche (which goes back much further). In any case it seems more fruitful, in the context of an introduction to Richard Emsley's music, to see each composition as part of a gradually unfolding process within his oeuvre—an oeuvre which in fact has many features in common with the processes exemplified in the individual works themselves.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's fascination for madness is clearly reflected in at least three of his works: Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), Miss Donnithonie's Maggot (1974) and Caroline Mathilde (1991). What are the consequences of this fascination for his music? How can madness in Davies's oeuvre be understood? In this article I will argue that, in spite of all his modernistic aspirations, Sir Peter's work shows a postmodernist tendency expressed iii the regular occurrence of the theme of madness, and the way it is disseminated through his music.

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.

In 2007, two high-profile musical responses to the Christian Passion narrative were written: the little match girl passion, by American composer David Lang, and Scottish composer James MacMillan's St John Passion. A devout Catholic, MacMillan's faith has influenced almost every work he has written to date, and a passion setting therefore seemed inevitable. Lang, on the other hand, has Jewish roots, and is relatively secular in his choice of extra-musical themes in his works: even when using sacred texts, he usually sets them in a secular context. Unsurprisingly, MacMillan's and Lang's contrasting approaches towards the Christian Passion resulted in fundamentally different works, yet both composers cite Bach as a key inspiration in their settings. This study examines the extent to which the influence of Bach's St Matthew Passion, in particular, is present in this pair of 21st-century passions, with regard to both their music and their theology.

This article is the first extended analytical study of the music of the Irish composer Andrew Hamilton. It explores the aesthetic ideas that inform Hamilton's music, which often have as much in common with the work of contemporary visual artists and writers as they do with that of other composers. It discusses the particular sense of humour underlying many of his pieces, as well as his music's use of common and supposedly simple materials, which are put in the service of new and original aims.

Gottfried Michael Koenig (b. 1926) is a seminal figure in the history of electronic music. He contributed important technical and musical ideas at WDR studio in Cologne from 1954 to 1964. He was then the director of the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Netherlands until 1986. Since 1986, Koenig has continued to compose, to develop complex computer systems, and to edit, translate, and publish his extensive corpus of theoretical writings.1 This conversation, which aims to foster further English-language scholarship on Koenig and his music,2 took place in English in May 2015 at the Institute of Sonology, now located in The Hague, Netherlands.