On the evidence of the last year alone, Thomas Adès's international profile, as well as his productivity, remains undiminished as he enters his sixth decade. In a concert on 6 March 2021 to mark his fiftieth birthday, he conducted Kirill Gerstein and the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of his In Seven Days and Sibelius's Sixth Symphony. Because lockdown restrictions in response to Covid-19 were still in force, the celebratory nature of the concert was necessarily muted – given behind closed doors, the players distanced – and only later uploaded to YouTube.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's cycle of chamber and electronic music, KLANG – die 24 Stunden des Tages (SOUND – The 24 Hours of the Day) was one of several music cycles, both realised and planned, in which the composer sought to capture the passage and meaning of time. Stockhausen's death in 2007 left KLANG with only 21 of its proposed 24 pieces composed. This article draws on Martin Heidegger's concept of time as ‘the horizon for the understanding of being’ as a lens through which to examine the musical content and imagery of KLANG and as a means of understanding the notion of being that Stockhausen conveyed in these compositions written at the end of his life. It will suggest a significant difference in Stockhausen's thinking about the nature of life and being, moving from the cyclic concepts conveyed in the earlier time-focused works such as SIRIUS and LICHT to a more linear notion of being in KLANG. Finally, the article will use this analysis to suggest that, despite Stockhausen's stated intentions to compose two more time-focused cycles after KLANG, he had begun to confront his own mortality, while continuing to believe in the possibility, if not the knowability, of hope beyond death.

There is a considerable imbalance between the presence of the music of Italian composer Pierluigi Billone in contemporary musical life and its presence in other media. The composer, now over 60 and based in Vienna since 2004, has appeared regularly on most of the major platforms for contemporary music, yet his music is only rarely reflected upon in print. This article attempts for the first time to illuminate some central aspects of his music, touching specifically on his understanding of Klang,1 on his structural and formal strategies and on the significance of the ritual and the corporeal in his oeuvre.

A range of aesthetic and technical features is explored in two of Adès's large-scale works, the operas The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, along with aspects of genre involving Stravinsky and Britten. Large-scale focus is offset by brief accounts of The Four Quarters and Dawn, considering their character in light of some recent initiatives in musicology.

This article examines the relationship between orchestration and microtonality in the music of Marc Sabat through a score-based analysis of two recent works, Asking Ocean (2016), for string quartet and large ensemble, and The Luminiferous Aether (2018), for large orchestra. Excerpts from these two compositions are discussed to highlight the challenges of composing for orchestral forces in a musical style that demands a high degree of microtonal pitch precision. Through retuning, alteration, and a sensitivity to the construction, techniques and performance practices of orchestral instruments, Sabat has developed a unique manner of orchestrating that is at once timbrally rich and uncompromising in pitch precision. After a brief introduction to the extended just intonation framework that Sabat employs, his concepts of ‘fixed microtonal pitches’ and ‘tuneable intervals’ are discussed and connected to orchestration in his scores. Drawing upon this analysis, connections are made between the microtonal system with orchestration and musical aesthetics broadly.

This article adopts a disability studies perspective to evaluate the ways in which Mauricio Kagel's Repertoire from Staatstheater reimagines human bodies. Objects and bodies interact in myriad ways within the one hundred vignettes of Repertoire: some objects hinder or aid the bodies on stage, while others become incorporated within the body, acting as a single expressive unit. My analysis demonstrates the ways in which both objects and bodies transform their traditional roles as ascribed by society, rejecting procrustean physiques. Using disability studies concepts such as embodiment and experientialism I evaluate sound and physical action as inextricable expressions of imaginative corporealities. Reflecting upon Kagel's identity as an outsider of the European avant-garde, as well as his irreverence for oppressive social institutions, I evince that other forms of hierarchical disruptions are at play, namely that abled bodies do not preside over disabled ones and notions of beauty hold no clout.

Despite an ever-expanding body of literature on Adès's engagement with the music of the past, his use of traditional formal models has attracted little critical comment. That which does exist privileges the relatively straightforward surface articulation of his musical forms over more nuanced accounts. In the case of Adès's sonata forms, this has had at least two consequences for our understanding of his music: first, that too strong an emphasis on syntactical groupings occludes what is happening discursively in the music; and second, that ‘textbook’ models are not the only formal tradition with which Adès's sonata forms engage. Rather, his sonatas bear traces of a rotational model that recalls the examples of Janáček and Sibelius. This article considers how Adès's sonata forms can be constituted not as neo-classical prefabrications but, a posteriori, as a practice that emerges across his career – from the Chamber Symphony and …but all shall be well to the Piano Quintet and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra – from an interaction between traditional syntactical groupings, thematic procedures and tonal plots.

This article takes up Rebecca Saunders’ comments on the significance of timbre in her work to develop a timbre-centred analytical technique for two of her compositions, Ire (2012), for cello and ensemble, and Still (2011), for violin and orchestra. Two overarching principles are identified: the organisation of the pieces’ sounds into clearly differentiated categories, which can also overlap in different ways, and the use of a phrase-based logic in the pieces’ formal construction. Alongside the timbral construction, stable pitches acquire formal significance by virtue of their rarity and conspicuousness. I also elaborate on the ways in which perceptual ambiguity is fruitfully exploited in these works.

Masculinity is not just about being the loudest; it is a contradictory network of relationships relating to power, control and work. Deploying the methodology first developed in Raewyn Connell's Masculinities (1995), this article argues that Wandelweiser works exhibit masculine social ordering. Silence presents apparent creative agency which is ultimately governed by the composer; fragile timbres strain the bodies of both the performers and listeners and encourage constant labour; openness displaces authorship, leaving interpreters to fill a composer-shaped hole. Analysis of these facets reveals a top-down power dynamic from these composers of the quiet that is integrally related to Connell's conception of hegemonic masculinity: the composer encourages reproduction and questioning of their dominant role from interpreters, which, counterintuitively, implicates their position of power. This investigation is interwoven with diary entries exposing and critiquing my own compositional process, demonstrating how masculinity is performed throughout my creative process and its subsequent documentation. This article explores how subversive, even if invisible, elements of masculinity lie within the process and product of composing instrumental music that initially may seem to counter typical ‘masculine’ musics.

Anne Boyd (b. 1946) is one of Australia's most celebrated composers and educators. Her formal training began at the University of Sydney, where she worked with Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014), who became a highly influential figure for her both musically and personally. Having completed her DPhil at the University of York in 1972 on a Commonwealth Scholarship, Boyd took up teaching posts in Sussex and Hong Kong, before returning to Sydney as Professor of Music, the first Australian and first woman to hold this position. Her music has been performed worldwide and draws on a synthesis of East-Asian and Western elements, with a clear focus on timbre and texture, invoking ideas of meditation, nature and ritual. This article presents a transcription of a virtual interview conducted with Boyd in February 2021 and uses the genre of the string quartet as a lens through which the composer elaborates and expands upon some of the key aspects of her musical approach and philosophy.

This article interrogates the formal and expressive roles of the opening horn-call topic in Thomas Adès's Piano Quintet (2001). Although William Caplin describes the relationship of topics to form as ‘rather tenuous’, he notes that some topics have a ‘likely’ formal relation.1 Within this, he includes the rising horn call as an initiating function. Drawing upon Charles Jencks’ influential concept of double coding, which describes a sign's ‘attempt to communicate with both the public and a concerned minority’,2 I show how the Piano Quintet's horn-call opening satisfies, on one level, the familiar (tonal) initiating formal function that Caplin describes but, understood in the context of two significant reversals of the horn call's characteristic rising contour to descending horn fifths (the openings of Beethoven's ‘Les Adieux’ sonata and Ligeti's Horn Trio), Adès's opening can be understood as transgressive. This Janus-faced interpretation of the opening bars engages both positively and critically with these references to the past, a double-coded understanding which points to Adès's continued popularity in both academic and concert spheres.

Sonic botany is an ongoing project that I have been developing over the past few years. It incorporates natural artefacts: dry leaves, pods, flowers, branches, rocks, bones and other organic findings. These are used as musical instruments that are played on with a scientific/musical tool: tuning forks in various frequencies. The vibration from the tuning forks resonates through the natural artefacts which amplify the vibration and – via sound – reveal the texture, size, material and condition of the organic matter. This process generates new sonic material, new context and new forms of musical composition. The practice developed into several compositions and projects, a performance practice, a notation system and a way of listening. Here I share some of the insights I gained through this process, the tools and the compositional framework.