This article undertakes a Kleinian analysis of the early feedback works of Éliane Radigue. By reading the melancholic nature of these works – their fixation on the ‘lost objects’ of recorded sound, and the self-recursivity of their feedback techniques – as sonically generative rather than merely mournful, I argue that Radigue's feedback works transcend the signifying order of much elegiac music, offering a distinct intervention and epistemology within the history of musique concrète, electronic music and the sonic arts.

The practice surrounding Éliane Radigue's Occam Océan works may be read as a new form of work concept, one which poses a productive contradiction against the work concept as it has been (and in some cases has been forgotten) and the work concept as we experience it today. Occam Océan poses a challenge to conventional conceptual understandings on many fronts, namely the practice's lack of notation; its collaborative creation; its particular structural criteria; its contingent, iterative and combinatorial manifestations; and, perhaps most significantly, its social reinscription within bodies. By historicising her work against the established work concept structures and identifying how its qualities create friction against them, Radigue's music is shown to create a small rupture at the heart of the concept itself, demonstrating the possibility of establishing radically alternative practices of music exchange and discourse.

This article is situated within the framework of a definition of curation of new music that includes, in addition to the choice of pieces, venues and players, the active choice of specific tools and roles that will be filled by people, roles that have rich traditions and expectations and are thus ripe for instrumentalisation. In earlier research we have demonstrated that the roles of musicians within new music have been instrumentalised, and in this article we aim to better understand the musicians’ response. One such observable response has been dubbed by artist–researchers Håkon Stene and Louise Devenish as ‘post-instrumental practice’. In this article we will discuss how and where we also observe this trend. We then test its sustainability through in-depth interviews with venue organisers and artistic directors as well as analysing funding and employers’ organisations’ published policies on socially and economically sustainable practices.

Unlike the pointillist-serial aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, contemporary music employs narrative strategies that stimulate listeners to form mental constructs. This involves using the potential of mid-level formal units to establish orientation points for the listener, exploring two repetitive models (deadlocked time and frozen time) that emerge as discrete building blocks from the current cognitive-theoretical perspective. Through analogical thinking, this article seeks to explain the potential references of these repetition-occurrences towards a temporal suspension and provides multiple examples based on selected passages from Ivan Fedele (b. 1953), Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) and Michael Jarrell (b. 1958). This inquiry suggests an apprehension capable of bringing an expressive stand to the forefront. It also scrutinises how cognitive approaches revolving around analogical thinking can be employed extensively in the analysis of post-tonal music.

This article reflects on my subjective position in relation to the ways in which time passes in two recent works, Dead Time (2019) and Towards a slowing of the past (2023). I consider how each of these pieces relates to my interest in musical time and demonstrate how the inclusion of pre-recorded materials has allowed me to explore aspects of memory and repetition in new ways. A Deleuzian model of difference and repetition is considered and used to illustrate how becoming might be observed in the mind and body of the perceiver as much as in the materials themselves. I reflect on the complex relationship between the virtual and the real by examining differences in perception between performed events and pre-recorded versions of those same events that are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. I discuss the ways in which sampled material integrated within the performances of these works might evoke different temporal states, such as metaxis, in which we are simultaneously engaged with aspects of pastness and presentness.

Luciano Berio's name appears once in the 1,134-page Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021), yet his poetics sits among the most profound and expansive of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s Berio was writing lucidly about tensions between synchronic and diachronic meaning. Such works as Sinfonia, the Sequenze and the electroacoustic output are radical applications of these ideas, yet they have been claimed by the proponents of the very structures they challenge and their meanings effectively reduced, notwithstanding Berio's insistence and clarity across his substantial writings. This article characterises Berio's work according to his poetics, demonstrating the ways in which Sinfonia actively stages the mechanisms of musical meaning, before situating Berio's writing in a context of contemporary theories of meaning. Particular comparison is made to the work of Harold Bloom, whose words transformed poetic discourse in the 1970s.

The letters sent by the English composer Michael Tippett from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where, a conscientious objector, he spent two months in summer 1943, form a remarkable and important sequence, illuminating not only Tippett's life and compositions but the experience of a gaoled objector to the Second World War. Four prison letters had been thought to survive, documenting in detail his imprisonment, which included turning pages for Benjamin Britten during a recital in the chapel, and conducting the prison orchestra. In 2023 a fifth letter was found, its discovery reported in the national press.1 Its publication is intended to complement the previously released documents, completing what is now a series of five until such time as a collected edition of Tippett's letters, of which only a fifth has seen print, can be undertaken.2