In 1999, both Hugh Wood and Alexander Goehr retired from Cambridge University. Goehrfest, a short festival put on to mark this occasion, featured performances of works by both composers (and others associated with the university), but for the most part, as the name suggests, it was Goehr's departure that generated the greater amount of retrospective stock-taking and speculation about the future. Indeed, the focus on Goehr was not surprising, for in comparison Hugh Wood's output and influence have to date been more modest. Nevertheless, the time is long overdue for a critical (re)assessment of Wood's music, which has demonstrated throughout his career an enduring concern with both directness of communication and the upholding of a core set of aesthetic and technical values.

Editor's note: Robin Freeman, who was a frequent contributor to Tempo in the 1990s, both in his own name and under his favoured alias of ‘Tristram Pugin’ (signifying Shandeian Gothick, perhaps), died of leukemia after long illness in November 2004. About a year before he had e-mailed the present essay to the Editor of Tempo, apparently more for interest than as a formal submission. Despite the characteristic difficulties of the text, some of which have been modified in the editing process, and its equally characteristic heedlessness of reputations (few other writers would have had the chutzpah to dismiss Charles Rosen's The Classical Style as ‘underinformed and overambitious’!), it has seemed well worth publishing here.

The path of a composer's career may include a number of unexpected twists and turns. Some of them may immediately seem to be quite radical, leaving many observers always in a state of thinking that the very last thing that the composer was doing was so much better than this new thing. Then, after time, in retrospect, the way is seen to have been straight and plain, rather than crooked and rough, and the development to have proceeded quietly with a consistent, internally logical progress, producing works whose commonality of artistic vision and structural procedure is more apparent than their more minor surface stylistic differences.

In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed that ‘what is needed is for expression to win back the density of experience, as was already tried during the expressionist period’. Composers should abandon this false form of the new music and begin to remember its earlier, more authentic manifestation.

Judith Weir (b.1954) is one of Britain's leading composers. Her three full-length operas (A Night at the Chinese Opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Blond Eckbert) have been widely performed in Britain and abroad. Since the 1990s she has had a fruitful association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its sister group, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). Weir's theatre work includes collaborations with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her interest in community music projects included an innovative spell of six years as the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. Recent works include the orchestral piece The Welcome Arrival of Rain for the Minnesota Orchestra, heard at the Proms in 2002, and the ensemble work The Tiger Under the Table for the London Sinfonietta.

Of all the different ingredients that combine to make up a musical performance, it often seems that the one which reveals most, and most extreme, variation is – tempo. Subject as it is also to various non-musical factors – such as acoustics; size of the locale; technical or instrumental limitations – as well as to other somewhat equally subjective conditions such as taste; historical or supposed authenticity; even fashion – this is hardly surprising. Maelzel's invention of his metronome almost two centuries ago has not necessarily succeeded in bringing order into chaos; it is notoriously difficult to set this device to give an incontrovertibly accurate answer to every question. (It is also known that some composers have possessed a metronome which, apparently being mechanically unsound, has raised more questions than it has answered.)

The re-discovery and recent commercial release, on Regis/Forum, of one of my earliest performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, cannot help but evoke a mood of piquant personal reminiscence. The recording was made in 1967 at Olympic Studios in London, roughly two years after I first became acquainted with this riveting, endlessly compelling and many-layered masterpiece. The mid-1960s were marked by optimism, eager creative responses to the challenge of the new, and a spirit of idealism that is perhaps difficult to recapture in today's more commercially-driven world.

Joan Guinjoan's opera Gaudí: el trencadís i l'absolut was commissioned as part of the cultural programme parallel to the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. Guinjoan completed the work in June of that year, but it was not staged until November 2004, the delay due in part to the fire of January 1994 that completely destroyed Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house (this had happened before, in April 1861). The rebuilding was completed in late 1999, though Guinjoan had to wait a further five years to see the opera staged. Librettist Josep Maria Carandell was not so lucky: he died in 2003.

Geoffrey Hill's latest book of poems, Scenes from Comus, borrows its title from Wood's op. 6, and is dedicated to the composer for his seventieth birthday. The two men have been friends for many years and are exact contemporaries: for the poet's seventieth birthday, Wood wrote a vocal-instrumental setting of Hill's Tenebrae. This interchange between poet and musician highlights Wood's abiding concern with poets and poetry, and particularly English verse of the 20th century. He has described this repertoire as ‘a treasure-house, and our poets continue to produce good lyric poetry to this day: it's a waste of being English not to draw on these riches; and the composer has a particular duty to the poets of his own time’. More recently, Jeremy Thurlow has drawn attention to Wood's ‘idiomatic and refined response to English verse: his songs for voice and piano form a considerable part of his oeuvre and must be considered the most distinctive and substantial contribution to British song-writing since Britten and Tippet’.

In his essay ‘What are twelve-note rows really for?’ (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 225, July 2003, p. 36), Michael Graubart suggests that ‘twelve-note rows may give back to atonal music a goal-directed force and the possibility of closure’. He argues that by using a row, composers set up a pattern that can ultimately provide a sense of completion or closure to an atonal piece, although he admits that listeners may have trouble recognizing this completion. Closure in tonal music is in fact a powerful musical force, but one whose strength depends largely upon the hierarchy found in tonal melody and harmony. Consider the closure at the end of a piece. It is here that an authentic cadence signals the coming to rest of large-scale musical forces, both melodic and harmonic, on several levels of structure. We might make analogies, as Graubart does, between tonal closure and the pattern-completion possible with a twelve-note row, but one wonders if any row, or any twelve-note piece for that matter, can provide the type of multi-level completion that is possible within the tonal hierarchy.

Between 22 September and 4 October last year, Gerard McBurney made a short research and lecturing trip to St Petersburg and Moscow. On his return he circulated a private, informal account of his activities and impressions of the current state of musical life in Russia to a number of interested parties and friends. Among these was the Editor of Tempo, who considered that parts of the report were of such interest that they merited wider circulation. At his request, Gerard McBurney has prepared this edited version of his report for publication.

Gerard Schurmann was born of Dutch parents in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, but spent more than 40 years, including the most formative period of his musical life, in England before moving to the US in 1981. Even during his years in the Netherlands as orchestral conductor with the Dutch Radio in his early twenties, he maintained an apartment in London, sometimes commuting to his place of work in Hilversum. His experience was similar to Bernard van Dieren, another Dutch-born composer who lived in England, although not for as many years as Schurmann: Holland has made no particular move to claim either as a Dutch composer. It was in England that Schurmann developed his skills and persona as a musician, after arriving as a teenager in 1941.

Just as a young grand master chooses, with a degree of self-acknowledgement, an opening that creates space for key playing strengths at a later stage, Jörg Widmann seems with every new work to alight on an initial strategy (usually in the form of just a single sound or a complex but discrete sonic entity) which not only occasions further related ideas in the composer's imagination but also reveals feasible compositional paths through the new material. In performance, this simultaneity of creation – in which the primary gesture is clearly a microcosm of the piece itself – may be perceived too in real time by the audience. Any closer analogy with the game of chess breaks down at this point: Widmann's openings remain ambiguous, marked by both a tentative approach and moved by a desire for more telling blows to render a score complete. Music – or the calling to write it, at least – remains nonetheless a considerable opponent. And the sense of the composer finding his bearings at the outset (one might say the onset) of a piece is palpable. A febrile tension is created.

The Zagreb Music Biennale is one of the world's venerable new-music festivals. Its early years – the festival was founded by the Croatian composer Milko Kelemen in 1961 – might have been the most prestigious, but both before and since the upheavals of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it has offered an important outlet for Croatian composers and performers themselves, and for foreign music and musicians, to receive an airing in a city always looking to the West for inspiration – and recognition. It's also an uncommonly well-run and friendly festival.

It was with surprise and delight that, whilst on a research trip to Paris about a year ago, I accidentally discovered a score dating from Henri Dutilleux's Conservatoire period in the 1930s. What I stumbled upon was a song, titled Barque d'Or, written for soprano and piano. Dutilleux's father, Paul Dutilleux, who owned his own printing firm in Douai, published Barque d'Or in 1937. Roger Nichols has quoted Dutilleux's recollection of his father's work:

All that ties in too with the craftsmanship I witnessed in my father's workshop, especially at the bench of one old engraver. We had a great respect for him, he looked like Brahms. On Sundays it was at that bench that my father sat me down to do my harmony exercises, without the piano. During the week my ears were full of the rumbling of the machines, but at those moments the absolute silence seemed to me to have an extraordinary quality — it was a very unusual feeling, which I often think about, and it was a great encouragement to the formation of my inner ear.

George Benjamin's rich harmonic imagination was apparent from his earliest published works. A distinctive chordal sensibility is already evident in the 1978 Piano Sonata, with its glittering streams of five- or six-pitch clusters; in the hollow bell-chords punctuating the 1979 orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat Horizon; and in the supreme stasis of the A-minor pedal chord (a six-three triad) unveiled by the icy glissandi lines opening A Mind of Winter (1981). All three pieces share a fascination with degrees of chordal resonance – the interplay of upper partials above a fundamental – and a sensitivity to chords as sound objects. True, Benjamin's style, beginning at least with Antara (1987), has shown signs of a more linear-contrapuntal orientation, and less reliance on what one critic terms ‘purely coloristic phenomena’. Yet one could equally claim some continuity between the refined harmonic world of the early scores and the surprising richness of chordal sonority to be heard in a far more recent arrival, the 1997 duo Viola, Viola.

When a Western musician thinks of Israel, the immediate association is of incessant political conflict and terrorism, not the country's rich cultural life. Yet, for a state that has endured one terrorist outrage after another over the last four years, Israel's thriving contemporary music scene — a part of classical music events, blossoming with over 2,300 classical concerts a year — is an astounding feat. In March 2002, while biweekly suicide attacks ended the lives of over 120 Israeli civilians, concert halls were unbelievably full despite the fear, or perhaps just because of it, as a constructive escapism. A year later, still under shaky political and economic conditions, Avigail Arnheim, the director of music events at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and Dan Yuhas, the newly-elected chair of the Israel Composers' League (and the music director of the Israel Contemporary Players) initiated preparations for three concurrent festivals of contemporary music in October 2004. A Western musician, not knowing the details, would think that they were planning events for Berlin and Munich audiences, and not for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem listeners.

Adriana Hölszky – Romanian-born, but Stuttgart-based since 1976 – scored a deserved, significant hit when her first opera, Bremer Freiheit, based on Rainer Maria Faessbinder, was staged at the 1988 Munich Biennale. Two other operas – one based on Jean Genet – had their premières in Vienna and Bonn, before Stuttgart's ever-pioneering Württembergisches Landestheater commissioned Giuseppe e Silvia, based on Hans Neuenfels, in 2000. A sheaf of chamber and orchestral works have seen premières at festivals such as Styria and Vienna, and (even more aptly) at Donaueschingen.

The name of the conductor Max Conrad is hardly one to conjure with. He admitted as much himself in the first paragraph of his memoirs, published in 1956: To be sure, I was born in Berlin, as was [Bruno Walter]; he attended the Askanische High School in Berlin – as did I; he left it without finishing his school leaving certificate – as did I; he studied music with teachers from the Stern Conservatory – as did I; and he soon became famous – and I … oh dear, now it becomes irregular, like a Greek verb …

For more than 30 years, Conrad (1872–1963) played a major role in the operatic life of Zurich. In the greater scheme of things, this might perhaps be regarded as of little significance, for Zurich's was then but a theatre in the outer provinces of the German-speaking world. Nor did Conrad achieve recognition by conducting important premières there, as did other men (such as Robert F. Denzler, who conducted the world premières of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler and Berg's Lulu in the 1930s, or Hans Rosbaud, who conducted the staged première of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in 1957). Conrad did train the flower maidens for the first (legal) performance of Wagner's Parsifal outside Bayreuth, given in Zurich in 1913 – but the première itself was conducted by the chief kapellmeister, Lothar Kempter. To be sure, Conrad did conduct the world première of the revised version of Othmar Schoeck's fine expressionist opera Penthesilea in 1928; but that is hardly enough to ensure anyone posthumous fame.

Time was when it was almost axiomatic that a new concerto would be premièred by its composer, pretty well from the beginnings of the genre until the onset of the recording age, which captured Rachmaninov at the keyboard for his own concertos. These days, though Rachmaninov is barely 60 years dead, composers and performers inhabit such separate boxes that it's a surprise to see a composer step forward to perform his own piece – the more so when the composer is a violist; the last person to do that may well have been Hindemith. So when Brett Dean came to the front of the Barbican platform on 15 April, to join the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Ramon Gumba, he became an important link in a fairly short chain.