Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

Seaton Snook was a thriving community of fishermen, blacksmiths, teachers, seacoalers, labourers and musicians on the coast of County Durham, UK. After 1968, however, government records and newspaper reports referring to the town cease and there are, apparently, no former residents still living. This article outlines the creation of What Happened to Seaton Snook?, an internet-based archive of sounds and music from the area, its residents and its workers, devised to try and form a picture of the town and what happened there. Among the nearly 100 artefacts in this ethnomusicological study are pieces for piano and harpsichord, pedagogic works, folk tunes for voice and Northumbrian smallpipes, brass band music, Krautrock, psychedelic rock and works for magnetic tape. There are biographies and photographs of people key to the history of the town, and interviews with experts in matters pertaining to the artefacts. The archive also seeks to examine the economic and cultural neglect of the North East of England and the importance of the stories we tell around the music we make.

Quarter-tones have the dubious honour of being the microtonal default in Western art music, yet they have been of little recent interest to those most involved with extended intonation. Other microtonal equal divisions have appealed as pragmatic approximations of consonant just-intonation intervals, something that quarter-tones do not offer. This article proposes that quarter-tones can be valued in a different way, for their ability to generate symmetrical harmonic resources that divide the fourth and fifth as the tritone does the octave. These resources are offered as examples of a broader aesthetic of symmetry, which is contrasted with an aesthetic of proportion. These antagonistic principles are explored through the case of the ever problematic tritone, illustrating how proportion and symmetry are best understood using the symbolic resources of just intonation and equal temperament respectively. Drawing on the work of Robert Hasegawa, Georg Friedrich Haas and Ivan Wyschnegradsky, the article argues for a hybrid approach that embraces both just intonation and equal temperament.

Between 1967 and 1988 Maryanne Amacher's City-Links series comprised radio broadcasts, sound installations and interdisciplinary performances featuring her practice of mixing sonic material from multiple remote locations joined via telecommunications infrastructure. These works reflect Amacher's compositional elevation of the process of sonic perception alongside musical material, an approach that would evolve to inform her later work in which she dealt with the musical potential of psychoacoustic phenomena known as auditory distortion products. This article aims to provide an overview of the City-Links series as a unique product of the experimentation in post-war avant-garde music and visual and conceptual art. After a synopsis of Amacher's early compositional development, I offer a comparison between Amacher's City-Links and John Cage's radio works, exploring different contemporary approaches to transmission and broadcast as a compositional medium. I then situate the site-specificity of the City-Links works within the extramusical frame offered by Amacher's contemporary Robert Smithson's site/non-site dialectic. The article finally suggests the necessity for a more holistic examination of Amacher's legacy that accounts for both the musicological and art-historical implications of her work.

This article defines and explores the concept of ‘resistance’ as a source of musical meaning in performance. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ as a framework, I examine my musical habitus: the embodied, internalised ways I play my instrument and think about music, which reflect my extensive musical histories and the fields in which these histories have taken place. Resistance arises in practice when this habitus is undermined. When the types of musicking undertaken circumvent my habituated understanding of acceptable performance and performative roles, it manifests as a pull towards more familiar modes of musical engagement. Making specific reference to resistance experienced in the development and performance of Alex Harker's Drift Shadow (2021), for solo oboe and electronics, the article outlines the ways in which my subjective relationship to my instrument and my role as a performer produce particular understandings of a work that can then nuance the way I play the piece.

This article proposes a series of connections between the consumption of resources, the creation of new music and ideas about sustainability. A number of examples is discussed, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, that illustrate the ways in which conspicuous, and often ethically questionable, consumption has been a signifier for innovation in new music. The article concludes by introducing three of the author's recent works, The calm of mountains, This has happened before and Hieroglyph, as models of a compositional practice that attempts to enact and embody ideas of sustainability.