In what would become known as the Notenkrakersactie, a group of composers, Louis Andriessen amongst them, famously disrupted a Concertgebouw Orchestra concert in 1969, protesting its Establishment politics and unwillingness to engage with the younger generation of Dutch firebrands. Nearly half a century later, Andriessen is a recipient not only of commissions from said orchestra but also of what is arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the most lucrative) composition prize in the world, the Grawemeyer Award. There is no great irony here, of course – music history is littered with examples of iconoclasts whose originality disoriented contemporary opinion, not to mention angry young men whose radicalism mellowed with age – but the case of Andriessen is certainly striking.

‘Love poems are the best things to make song cycles out of’, Hugh Wood claimed in a pre-Prom interview. Wood's affection for English poetry dates back a long way: Scenes from Comus, his Milton setting premiered at the Proms in 1965 set his career going.

Kammer Klang is enjoying a purple patch. Based in East London's Café Oto, the series sits in a sweet spot between the rougher-edged music usually played at Oto and the more conventionally white cubed silence of new music. Audiences are generally relaxed in the setting, despite creaking chairs. The series' mixed programmes gel, with the distance between various featured musics growing ever smaller as cultural demographics continue to shift.

The solo exhibition ‘Week’ was conceived for the sky-lit gallery on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle Basel in 2012. At the very centre of the gallery space a mono-block of loudspeakers was playing 7, a visual representation of which was notated for the brochure of the exhibition. 7 is constructed from two versions of an acoustic bass drum sample, which acts as a minimal ‘audio-diagram’ representing the ever-repeating cycle of the seven days of the week. The piece was constructed using a scale of 1:86400 (24 hours × 60 minutes × 60 seconds); in other words, a second refers to a day in ‘real time’. The bass drum sample sounds on each second, creating a steady beat with a tempo of 60 bpm which, for some visitors, is a direct reminder of certain types of electronic dance music. On top of the beat, a computer-generated voice recites the days of the week in English, one day per second. Occasionally, the voice switches to counting the days without specific names: ‘day, day, day … ’. The audio piece used the vocabulary and acoustic characteristics of minimal electronic music in order to represent a temporal unit, by using the means of time itself, whilst the visual representation (notation) was used as an aid to describe the simple idea behind the sonic counterpart.

‘How do you deal with endings?’, Stephen Newbould, BCMG's Artistic Director, asked a group of four composers in an interview prior to the ensemble's final concert of the season, given on 12 June. Perhaps Newbould was thinking out loud: ‘Remembering the Future’ marked his and Executive Producer Jackie Newbould's last event with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, after a tenure of nearly 30 years. The CBSO Centre was packed to the rafters for this concert that featured new commissions by Luke Bedford, Richard Baker, John Woolrich and Zoë Martlew: four composers with strong connections to the group. At the suggestion of John Woolrich, in his role as Artist-in-Association with BCMG, the works were scored not for BCMG's usual larger forces but for Schoenberg's ‘Pierrot’ ensemble, with various additions and subtractions.

The 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (or hcmf//, a vital acronym for Twitter users) began not with a bang, but with an anti-fanfare of dense pianissimo sliding microtones, buzzy with multiphonics. The scene was thus set (by Klangforum Wien performing Substantie by Peter Jakober) for an intense opening evening of three performances that between them encapsulated some of the musical themes, trends and ideas set to play out across the ten days and 30 events to come at Britain's leading contemporary music festival.

It's hardly easy to integrate new music into the Proms, a classical music festival that is unique, in this country at least, in the way it manages to harness popular appeal. And it's probably all but inevitable that many of the festival's commissions end up being expressly ‘inspired by’ or written ‘as a complement to’ the mainstream big-hitters alongside which they appear. Given the inevitable presence on the bill of Mahler, say (or Sibelius this anniversary year), it makes a certain amount of sense that the new piece – yet to be written when its slot is assigned, after all – might aim to relate in some tangible way to the rest of the programme.

History offers us many examples of successful collaborations between librettists and composers (the Da Ponte–Mozart, Boito–Verdi, Hofmannsthal–Strauss pairings, to name just a few), and novelist Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae's new opera, The Devil Inside, offers further evidence that equal partnerships between creative contributors in an opera can yield impressive results. The Devil Inside is the pair's third collaborative venture, and their second co-commission from Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales; further continuity comes in the form of their creative team – director Matthew Richardson, conductor Michael Rafferty, set and costume designer Samal Blak and lighting designer Ace McCarron, all familiar from their previous opera, Ghost Patrol – resulting in a noticeable synergy of music, drama and language in this production worthy of a wide audience.

‘The desire to create’, wrote Copland, ‘is the basic need to make evident one's deepest feelings about life’. This aspiration to use art for self-expression, or even self-discovery, is universal amongst composers, but is always accompanied by the danger that the subject matter ends up too close to the composer's psyche, leading to a self-indulgence in the music.

The opening weekend of hcmf// presented concerts representative of the widening sense of stylistic diversity that seems to underlie this year's curatorial strategy.

Despite the ever-dwindling pot of public money available to exploratory musicians in the UK and elsewhere, various ensembles are nonetheless busy making hay whilst at least a little sun still shines. In London in the space of only a week or two in the second half of April, for instance, audiences could catch a series of new music recitals given by the Park Lane Group of young musicians, an evening of premieres with the Workers’ Union Ensemble, and concerts by the Riot Ensemble and by the London Contemporary Orchestra Soloists. Other cities, from Glasgow to Birmingham, enjoy a similarly wide range of activity.

‘Old mythologies’ have been important for some time to Anna Clyne, and they come into play again in two of her most recent works: the violin concerto The Seamstress and her brief Auden setting, This Lunar Beauty, for soprano and ensemble. The young British composer (b. 1980) has for many years been a resident of New York; she studied with Julia Wolfe in Manhattan and since 2010 has been the composer in association with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

John Luther Adams holds a unique position in American contemporary music. His works are as tinged with minimalist virtues as they are rigorously experimental, offering sound worlds that seem at once unearthly and welcoming, unconventional yet accessible. At the core of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer's work lies a major concern with translating the tenuous and illusory concept of acoustic and natural sonic space into densely textured instrumental works. Exploring the composer's oeuvre, one senses a deep fascination with acoustic phenomena; in works such as the orchestral soundscape Becoming Ocean (2012), and the percussion pieces Inuksuit (2009) and Strange and Sacred Noise (1997), the composer eschews any audible rhythmic and melodic complexities in favour of serene yet coursing sound masses and highly sonorous ensemble textures.

In keeping with now-established tradition, Monday was devoted to ‘hcmf// shorts’, a series of free, mostly bite-size concerts. The format is certainly appealing as a way to encounter a diverse range of musical worlds in one go, and it is valuable as a starting-point for those less familiar with new music; every event I attended was packed, and it was encouraging to see students, school groups and families among the attendees. Concerts in different venues were linked by Stephen Chase's participatory walking pieces, which transformed the journeys between them into enjoyable explorations of the changing acoustic environment (thanks to a route that took in tunnels, corridors, traffic and so on).

Gentrification, spiralling rent, economic inequality, traffic chaos – the people of London have come to dread what ‘change’ entails. However, I'm convinced that some things have changed for the better: today's ‘new music scene’ (which I identify as that populated by composers and performers of notated contemporary music, creative improvisers, their concerts, networks and ideas) is radiating a vibrancy that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago. I want to celebrate it.

The Spire, St Mark's chapel, is an artist-led creation space in Brighton. Normally it's a blank space without heating or equipment but for the night of 10 May it is fantastically dressed up with lights, pictures and a projection saying ‘landmark post-classical recordings’. This is a label showcase for 130701, an offshoot of FatCat Records set up by Dave Howell in 2001. Hauschka, one of the label's longstanding artists who has opened up his imaginative and playful inside-piano playing to commercial audiences, and the label's willingness to support live experimental music are the reasons I'm here.

Is there any London concert venue more suited to the music of Christian Wolff than Café Oto? It's not so much its status as the nexus of hipster lounge and ascetic experimentalism as its noisiness. No sooner had violinist Aisha Orazbayeva and pianist Joseph Houston begun to play Wolff's indeterminate classic For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964) than I was reminded of John Cage:

Roughly midway through this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a solo recital performance by the glissando flautist Erik Drescher somehow managed to capture simultaneously much of what makes today's hcmf// both interesting and infuriating. Drescher's choice of four pieces, obviously severely limited by the finite number of works scored for his unusual instrument, managed to forge divisions even through what seemed a somewhat partisan audience. Pairing the by-now somewhat familiar and perhaps predictable stylings of Salvatore Sciarrino's Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio with his fight to be heard over the wall of blasting electronic noise featured in Dror Feiler's Questions and Stones 3, and then again against the subtle simplicity of Alvin Lucier's Double Himalaya meant that most left in parts satisfied and in parts irritated.

They say London is dying (again): this time smothered by affluence, its youth fleeing for affordable refuge in the provinces, its culture concreted over by the corporate Cyclops. As far as new music goes, these are tough times in the capital, for sure (where are they not?), but the established ensembles and organisations cling on like the tenacious buddleias on the walls fringing suburban train lines, and here and there new cracks appear in the pavement, energetic wildflowers springing up through them to take their chance in the light.

A ‘Festival für Zeitfragen’, a ‘festival for questions about time’, has been the motto for MaerzMusik since Berno Odo Polzer became its artistic director one year ago. In a way, the topic is rather self-evident, which might lead to a thematic flat-out – music in general is about, amongst other things, time – but the ambitions are high. Since the 2015 edition, there has been a seminar series running parallel to the concerts, which has the aim of deepening our understanding and thoughts about time, from cultural, artistic, political and scientific points of view. And sometimes it did. Sometimes it even managed to provide perspectives on what was happening, musically, at MaerzMusik.