The composer Robin Walker is 60 this year. David Matthews, who has known Walker and his music well since the composer was 23, gives an overview of his life and the development of his musical language from serial modernism to what Walker calls ‘modal chromaticism’ – essentially a renewal of tonality, with strong links to both Wagner and Sibelius. The thinking that led to this development, which is linked to Jungian psychology, is discussed, and there is an examination of five major works from Walker's extensive catalogue, including his seminal orchestral piece The Stone Maker.

On 1 September, ten days after the premiere in Birmingham of the ‘Wednesday’ segment of Stockhausen's Licht cycle, a vocal sextet written in tandem with the final scene received an airing at a matinée concert in Lucerne's Matthäuskirche. Composed, like the rest of Mittwoch, in 1997, Menschen, hört (‘Listen, people’) obviously carried special significance for the composer. The a cappella piece can be performed independently of the cycle, and Stockhausen's text is inscribed on the gravestone he designed for himself ten years before his death.

Edgard Varèse's Ionisation was a groundbreaking composition that presented unique ideas and problems concerning percussion orchestration. This article examines correspondence between Varèse and Nicolas Slonimsky about the tarole – a snare drum used in the work. In one letter Varèse sketched this instrument in order to show its relationship with a more common orchestral snare drum of the period. This information provides insight into performance practice and the orchestral conception of the work.

As diverse and inquiring as ever, the 35th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival provided nine days of unfamiliar and rarely encountered repertoire, sometimes rewarding, sometimes baffling, but always worth sampling. The 2012 late-November celebration of avant-gardism placed an emphasis on Norway and the voice in its many guises, both strands exemplified by the choice of Trondheim-born vocalist Maja S. K. Ratkje as composer-in-residence. Yet despite this spotlight on vocal and choral works, there was no shortage of instrumental and chamber music, most of it new to Britain.

Was it a reflection of the current economic squeeze or a deliberate retreat from the ways of Gargantua following the bold programming of Havergal Brian's mighty Gothic Symphony in 2011? Whatever the reason, brevity seemed to be the keynote of a good deal of new music featured in the 118th Proms season. In fact, few commissions and premières, including the majority of those considered below, lasted much longer than ten minutes.

In its unswerving devotion to new music at its most uncompromising, the Flemish Transit Festival represents a model of the kind of festival that has now almost vanished from Britain. Based in the intimate university town of Leuven, the 2012 festival was the thirteenth: 48 hours of music and events concentrated into a weekend, running from Friday night to Sunday (26–28 October). Located mainly in the unprepossessing concrete 1970s STUK arts centre (with surprisingly good acoustics), the 12 events (plus pre-concert talks) followed upon one another with a rapidity that almost negated the opportunity to draw breath, let alone eat in between.

The American public has been left in an odd position for the past few years in terms of the War on Terror. As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan slowly trickle away our news outlets have lost interest in calculating the statistics of death, and we have become complacent and apathetic. The greatest fallacy in our vision of war is that wars have an end, when in reality war has never ended, but rather switched conflicts, like influenza. War will never end as long as natural human short-sightedness remains intact. Large-scale global communication may help in ending the threat of war, as new moral conflicts arise once we realize we can have a face-to-face conversation with a colleague on the other side of the world. Rodney Lister's Friendly Fire, premièred at Boston's Longy School of Music this past May in the coincidental wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, is a wide-ranging and harrowing plea for pacifism in the face of apathy. However, its performance by Charles Blandy and Collage New Music may betray its cause, meeting terror with tenuousness.

In 1897 Schoenberg composed an apparently unfinished set of waltzes, which thus far has been dismissed as juvenilia. In this article I explore how the waltzes reflect many aspects of Schoenberg's mature thought about large-scale tonality, focusing on two interrelated concepts, the tonal problem and monotonality. Examination of the waltzes through Schoenberg's own analytical methods reveals a series of closely interrelated pieces that follow a carefully planned progression through key areas making use of frequent intertextual references between waltzes. After demonstrating the connexions and progression of the waltzes, I propose that the set is not in fact incomplete, but that the tenth waltz offers a functional conclusion to the set as a whole.

Postmodernism in music may be hard to define – even harder than the same notoriously slippery term in literature – but Olga Neuwirth's viola concerto Remnants of songs … an Amphigory (2009) may be as good an exemplar as any. Given its UK première on 13 August by the talented British violist Lawrence Power, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Susanna Mälkki, the concerto's Proms appearance marks the first time the festival has put on any of her pieces.

If I had to sum up Martinů's opera Julietta in one word, it would be ‘strange’. Strange and wonderful, strange bordering on the weird, the otherworldly, the dream-like. This last redefinition is apt, since the opera is based on Georges Neveux's play Juliette, ou La clé des songes – the Key to Dreams, a benign nightmare where a Parisian bookseller, Michel, searches for, finds, loses and finally searches again for a girl encountered briefly three years earlier. The action opens with his return and discovery that she lives in a town where no one has much depth of memory beyond the previous ten minutes! And when random shafts of recollection from further back do occur – as in the scene in the Forest with the Wine Waiter and the Old Couple – they only add to the surrealism of the situation and Michel's deepening confusion, with that pointed imprecision so natural in dreams yet so out of place in reality.

In Benjamin Britten's centenary year, the music of its founding father featured widely at the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival. However, there was also a strong showing of music by contemporary composers, including six new pieces for different ensembles co-commissioned by the Britten–Pears Foundation and the Royal Philharmonic Society to mark the bicentenary of the foundation of the RPS, as well as Britten's hundredth anniversary.

As with the symphony, the rites have been read over opera as a form many times, yet even in the 21st century it stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Three recent premières exemplify the basic strength of the genre: a revision of a radical 20th-century icon, and two wholly new works, one based on a psychological science-fiction classic (twice turned into a feature film), the other on a historical, post-medieval King of Sweden. What links the three together is the psychological examination of the events portrayed.

Since 1992, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (founded in 1969 by composer John Metcalf) has focused exclusively on living composers, aiming to reach a wider audience than that traditionally associated with new music. In Metcalf's words: ‘We're not here for … the new music profession; of course, composers, ensembles and publishers are an important part of our audience, but … new music needs to go beyond that now’. However, Vale programmes do not lack challenge or stylistic diversity; alongside more recognized figures, the Festival showcases hitherto little-known composers and explores a variety of music from smaller countries and/or younger traditions. Premières are a key feature of the programming. This year, the Festival was extended to run from 9–18 May, adding a second concert to the customary single contribution from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Across a range of platforms, there were 19 premières of music by 10 composers. The following offers some of the highlights.

On 21 August the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons, gave the first UK Performance of Emily Howard's Calculus of the Nervous System. The work is the concluding panel of a triptych (the earlier ones are called Ada sketches and Mesmerism), which is a tribute to Ada Lovelace (1815–52), the daughter of Lord Byron who, as a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. The title is that of the mathematical model that Lovelace hoped to develop to demonstrate how, as Howard writes, ‘the brain gives way to thought, and nerves to feeling’. Howard conceived Calculus of the Nervous System as a series of ‘memories’, whose structure is ‘a neural network with its roots in strictly engineered time … using values from one source (an exponential equation and its derivative), subsequently muddled and reordered by chance processes’. The memories are linked in some way that is not clear and not explained by the quotations from Sir Geoffrey Hills's Clavics which appear in the score (but which are not in any way audible or able to be apprehended by anyone without a score).

The world première of Jörg Widmann's new opera Babylon, conducted by Kent Nagano at the Bayerische Staatsoper, on 27 October 2012, was an evening to remember, for both the spectacular production and the musical performances. It began with a poignant announcement from the stage that Widmann had dedicated the performance in gratitude to the memory of his teacher, Hans Werner Henze, who had died that very morning in Dresden at the age of 86. One's thoughts turned to Henze's own wonderful operatic oeuvre, especially The Bassarids, which shared with Babylon an interest in ancient myth and pastiche. Yet curiously, it was a totally different postmodern influence on Widmann that seemed more evident here: that of another mentor, Wolfgang Rihm.

In a baffling case of unhelpful scheduling, major new works by Mark-Anthony Turnage were showcased by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra in concerts held at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool and London's Barbican, respectively, on the same evening – 7 February 2013. Apart from necessitating an explanation for the composer's absence from the RLPO concert in their season's programme book, this double booking resulted in audiences being unable to experience live performances of two of Turnage's most substantial recent orchestral pieces. Surely one of these significant premières could have been rescheduled to another date – or, if not, a different time of day, creating a sporting chance to experience both events? Fortunately, the LSO concert was broadcast, enabling those of us who chose to attend the Liverpool concert to catch the London première retrospectively.

Premièred at the Bridgewater Hall on 23 May, Near Midnight, by the Hallé's new Associate Composer Helen Grime (born 1981) is scored for large orchestra including celeste and five percussionists. The work opened in the lowest registers for harp and double basses, with quiet undulations including trills, and bells. These dark and deep sounds formed the background to a crescendo built out of accumulating upward scales. The opening patterns developed a swirling motion that gave rise, after about two minutes, to vaguely mechanistic ostinato-like figurations underpinned by deep pedals – providing the backdrop to various intermittent solos, including flute.

Given that the BBC Philharmonic had taken the courageous step to perform not one but two substantial premières on 1 February, one might have expected enticing potboilers to make up the rest of the menu. However, the remainder of the programme was devoted to Stravinsky's Petrushka (admittedly his most colourful ballet) along with his austere Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The concert was given a novel twist in that the first half (Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Hakola Violin Concerto) was directed by visiting guest conductor Håkan Hardenberger with John Storgårds as soloist; whilst in the second half (Broström Trumpet Concerto and Petrushka) Storgårds donned his more familiar guise as Principal Guest Conductor, with Hardenberger in his better-known role as trumpet soloist.

A substantial new work by Alexander Goehr, lasting some 37 minutes in performance and scored for tenor solo, children's voices and ensemble, constituted the second half of the opening concert of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's 25th anniversary season. This world première of the latest BCMG ‘Sound Investment’ commission was conducted by Oliver Knussen, whose discerning advocacy of Goehr's music is deep-rooted and long established.

Way back in the mists of time, in the decade when I was a card-carrying Prommer (1977–87), the BBC used to arrange (and maybe still does) a meeting between us regular Prommers and the Controller, Music – the man whose choices governed two months of our lives every year. Robert Ponsonby was the incumbent when I first had a season ticket and John Drummond was at the helm when I left London for a job in Paris. We never had the impression that anything we said made a blind bit of difference, but at least it allowed us to get things off our chests; all the Controller had to do was fend off our questions and comments with the oiliness then customary with the high functionaries of the BBC (they're all wonderful now, of course) and our silence was obtained for another year. (I remember Drummond contemptuously dismissing the music of Respighi as being beneath the dignity of the institution; Roger Wright, I gratefully note, does not share Drummond's snobbish ignorance, but I also note that neither the Concerto gregoriano for violin and orchestra nor Metamorphosen, both orchestral masterpieces, has yet been heard there.)