To distinguish differences of harmony, to compose music so that players and listeners may sense these variations naturally, in real time, the representation of harmonic space in musical notation must be precise yet simple to read. Shadings of intonation are most clearly conceived in relation to consonant, untempered intervals. Intervals derived from a common frame of reference may be represented by microtonal signs, which suggest potentially tuneable intervallic relationships.

John Croft's article ‘Composition is not Research’ challenges a conception and ideal of compositional work in academia which has grown in prominence over several decades in the UK. As a performer-scholar, who also writes non-performance-related scholarship, I welcome this challenge, share some of Croft's reservations about the ways in which these conceptions often manifest themselves, and also have concerns about the rushed integration of practitioners into academia and the implications for more traditional forms of scholarship. However, I find many of Croft's formulations and assumptions too narrow, and instead argue that a good deal of the process of composition and performance does constitute research – grappling with difficult questions, exploring solutions, and producing creative work which embodies these solutions and from which others can draw much of value.

This article discusses how normative perceptions of British contemporary orchestral music can be underpinned by a residual binary of ‘clarity’ versus ‘complexity’ as positive and negative value judgements respectively, informing public discourse around the orchestra by reviewers, audiences and performers alike. A post-war valorisation of ‘clarity’ is traceable to the transparent neo-tonal harmony, melodic invention and approaches to orchestration characteristic of the post-Britten tradition. The adoption of such a valorisation by ‘mainstream’ contemporary British composers, exemplified by Faber Music, has generalised an aesthetically specific compositional approach. Using the examples of Thomas Adès and George Benjamin, the article shows how certain residual normative approaches to material and notation are defined against the tendencies of ‘complexism’ as exemplified by Brian Ferneyhough. This binary has engendered conservatism towards traditions of radical new orchestral music that do not conform to normative expectations of ‘clarity’, as the immediately perceptible separation and identification of musical elements.

In recent years there has been an increase in the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of scholarly and popular writing on the histories of electronic music in Britain. In this literature, the contributions of Peter Zinovieff (b. 1933) and his computer-equipped electronic music studio to those histories have been variously exaggerated, underestimated and misreported. This article attempts to correct this misinformation, investigating Zinovieff's solo work and his collaborations with Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze and others, through a critical discussion of two recent contributions to the discourse surrounding the compositions realised at Zinovieff's EMS studio in the 1960s and 70s.

In the last few months of his life, Bob Gilmore embarked on another major project: that of writing a book about my work. He pressed me to try to define what I meant by non-conceptual composition and composition as an art form. This is a condensation of some of the topics we talked about for many hours.

This reply addresses a number of misunderstandings that have arisen with regard to my argument in ‘Composition is not Research’; notably that it rests on a definition of research derived from ‘scientific method’, and that it somehow entails the view that composers should not be asked to write about their music. It is argued here that referring to composition as ‘research’ is at best a perverse (if institutionally expedient) way of talking about what composers have always done, and at worst leads to a distorted picture of compositional work and musical value.

Located on the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, Sonorama is an audio work that offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train, downloadable as an App for listening with headphones.

Of the conversations I had with Bob Gilmore when he was a Dartington College lecturer and lived in Totnes, five minutes from where I live, there was one in particular that we returned to a few times. And it concerned the way the burgeoning American folk movement from the 1920s through to the 50s interacted with experimentalism in music, perhaps surprisingly, yet in some significant ways.

Morgen und Abend is Georg Friedrich Haas's seventh opera, a co-commission by the Royal Opera in London and Deutsche Opera in Berlin. It is an hour-and-a-half long, and its libretto is adapted from the novel Morgon og Kveld (2000) by Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whose work Haas previously adapted in Melancholia for the Paris Opéra. Morgen und Abend's two continuous scenes present the life of fisherman Johannes by focusing on its two most salient moments – Johannes's birth (in the morning) and death (in the evening). In this strategy there is a slight, if inadvertent, echo of the lights on/lights off of Haas's In Vain.

Christopher Fox:Apartment House has a reputation as the principal UK ensemble for experimental music, in all its different forms. When you began the ensemble, did you have a clear idea about what musical direction you were going to take, or has it changed over time?

It seems impossible at first to review multiple nights of the London Contemporary Music Festival all at once – over the course of a week the cavernous Ambika P3 gallery hosted a sensory overload of music that, while not always new, was certainly contemporary in the atypical thematic presentations, bringing together provocative works in provocative ways. Running from 11 to 17 December, the three middle nights of LCMF all dealt with the monumental: large, long works that opened up audience perceptions by virtue of extended contemplation. The concerts on Sunday and Tuesday lasted over three hours; they weren't easy, but they prompted salient experiences.

Sideshow, for amplified octet and electronics by American composer Steven Takasugi, was given its US premiere by Talea Ensemble in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 1 December 2015. A 2010 Guggenheim Foundation grant launched Takasugi's work on this hour-long piece, and the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik programmed the first performance in their November 2015 festival. The piece was eagerly anticipated, not least because an excerpt of it featured in Manchester-based Distractfold Ensemble's programme at Darmstadt in 2014, a performance that earned them the Kranichsteiner performance prize that year.

Today I know what I want to say, but on the other hand I am a little uncertain about how to approach it because some of the material is, shall we say, ‘delicate’. So excuse me for using Bob Gilmore as a way in, a role I think he would have relished.

National Sawdust opened in October 2015, and behind its brick facade in Brooklyn a promising venue for new music was unveiled, overseen by composers, creators and visionaries. Splotched in haphazard polygons and neon tubes, the modest space offers an intimate environment for a new generation of artists to showcase their work. The venue's name comes from the sawdust factory that once occupied the century-old building at 80 North 6th street, and which its governing non-profit organisation raised over $16 million to bring to life. The building was designed by Bureau V architects and the acoustic consultants from Arup, who made some critical decisions, such as placing the building on over 1,000 metal springs to absorb the shock from the subway trains running nearby. Advised by a board whose members include Philip Glass, Renée Fleming and Laurie Anderson, composer and entrepreneur Paola Prestini helms the organisation.

A short paper hardly stands in need of an epigraph, but I'm going to give mine one all the same. Here, then, are four lines, a quatrain, using every letter in the alphabet except for the loss of B, O, G, I, L, M, R and E.

The London Ear Festival is a small contemporary chamber music festival in London, now in its fourth edition. The festival is centred on the venues of the Cello Factory (its festival hub) and the Warehouse, near Waterloo. Despite its centrality and accessibility, the festival maintains a community and village feel: a sort of musical oasis. This year's festival, running 9–13 March, was timetabled against a number of other notable concerts in London – not least those celebrating Michael Finnissy's seventieth year – and so can be commended on its ability to draw audiences despite this clash, suggesting, perhaps, that it is genuinely offering something musically different and desirable.

Sibelius' and Nielsen's 150th anniversary year has prompted a proliferation of events to celebrate the music of the Nordic composers, from conferences to concert series. The Proms has been no exception, with an unusually high number of Nordic composers represented throughout the festival (although Glazunov, also in his 150th anniversary year, has been forgotten). British composer Gary Carpenter's Dadaville was premiered on the first night, which opened to the sounds of Nielsen's Maskarade and Sibelius's Belshazzar's Feast, while later concerts covered here presented premieres by the Swedish composers Anders Hillborg and B Tommy Andersson, the Norwegian composer Ørjan Matre, and Moscow-born (though UK-based) composer Alissa Firsova.