This article explores ways in which artistic directors and composers of new music ensembles have developed and redefined the role of the conductor to achieve specific goals and fulfil musical and artistic need. It will explore various manners in which they have instrumentalised the conductor – literally an embodied role – and opened new possibilities for musical expression. The analysis and examples provided will rely for the most part on material gathered during in-depth interviews conducted with artistic directors, composers, conductors and musicians who are professionally active in the new music field in Europe and beyond. The article endeavours to bring into greater detail artistic and socio-economic motivations for utilising conductors in new music ensembles.

This article interprets John Zorn's composition Interzone (2010) by comparing it to the eponymous place that is found throughout William S. Burroughs’ early novels. This is done through linking some of the ‘sound blocks’ that make up Zorn's composition to selected passages from Burroughs’ books as well as to specific events from the lives of Interzone's two dedicatees: Burroughs, and his associate, the writer and painter Brion Gysin. Zorn's disjointed, chaotic arrangement of sound blocks, and by extension their extra-musical associations, is then shown to emulate the dream-like structure of the phantasmatic place that is Interzone, which Burroughs created for his novels with the aid of Gysin's ‘cut-up’ method. Through these extra-musical connotations, it is demonstrated that Zorn's composition imitates Interzone's distortion of place; of internal and external space; and, most importantly, of time.

Demonstrating an ability to both subscribe to and question aesthetic and formal conventions, the music of Thomas Adès has become synonymous with a particular brand of complexity; various multiplicities – stylistic, temporal, semantic – characterise the discourses that both pervade and surround his works. This might help explain the fractured critical response to Dawn, a ‘chacony for orchestra at any distance’, premièred at the 2020 BBC Proms: a seven-minute unfurling passacaglia of stark simplicity. Mixed reviews have presupposed rationales ranging from bold aesthetic choice to deadline-induced haste. This article considers Dawn within Adès's continuing exploration of the different formal, aesthetic and semantic roles that musical simplicity can play. Here, his previous utilisation of simplicity at points of formal crux allows a reframing of the work as a compositional response to real-world crisis that, beneath its surface, presents an intriguing affinity with – and recontextualisation of – fundamental aspects of his compositional character.

This article is an introduction to the graphical impetus in the music of Kenneth Hesketh (b. 1968), from around 2012 to the present day, including his recent work, Viae (2020). Through examination of Hesketh's graphical control of a number of musical parameters, the article will demonstrate that the idea of a ‘musical ekphrasis’ can be extended through the incorporation of spatial aspects in determinate music to result in what the author deems a graphical ekphrasis. Whilst in no way exhaustive in its exploration of Hesketh's multi-parametric approach to composition, the article provides an analysis of selected compositional methodologies relating to both composition design and audience communication, situating them alongside other contemporary musical examples and trends.

This article explores an emergent vanguard of the ‘historically informed performance’ (HIP) movement in the twenty-first century, focusing on new music written for, and performed on, historical instruments. Drawing on musicological and journalistic writing, as well as first-hand interviews with artists working in the scene, discussion is centred around the work of three key practitioners: the lutenist Jozef van Wissem, gambist Liam Byrne and baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir. Finally, an attempt is made to situate the scene, both in relation to earlier revivalist practice and to broader cultural trends, drawing, in particular, on notions of ‘retromania’, post-internet and post-postmodernist practice.

This article explores Julio Estrada's musical thinking in his early and recent works. Estrada's early works precede the development of his graphication method in the 1980s, and his recent works follow the completion of his opera Murmullos del Páramo in 2006. It is his music of these three decades between 1980 and 2006 that is most widely scrutinised – a music centred on the extensive conception and manifestation of sound as a continuum and aided in the creational process by coloured drawings on graph paper – but this article focuses on lesser-known pieces from the 1970s like Melódica and Solo para uno, as well as recent works such as his opera-in-progress, a major project conceived as a book to be read and imagined, rather than performed. It is hoped that close examination of these pieces will significantly broaden the understanding of Estrada's creative drive and lifelong research, revealing how these works entangle with his better-known developments of the sound continuum and graphication method and share common concerns with work from across his career.

Colin Riley's collaborative and curated project In Place (2015–18) – with its exploration of memory, place, language and identity – becomes a stimulus for considering the intertwining relationship between the song cycle and the album form. Featuring seven commissioned poets alongside found texts, In Place simultaneously assembles fragments of contemporary Britain and its broken tongues whilst reflecting on the current possibilities for binding these through song. Riley and his collaborators construct a sense of place in the movements between idiom, psychogeography, field recordings, samples, instrumental voices, speech and song, rather than from any fixed location, reference, identity or origin. I argue that this adapts and learns from the history of the album as a form of double binding, both of a finite set of materials and, crucially, of a community or interpersonal relations. With its development in the modern era through the poetry collection, song cycle, and recording, the album provides a model for living, collective remembrance, contrasting with the archival paradigm of preserving cultural authority. Its transformation and persistence are pursued with the emergence of the concept album through to music streaming, offering an historical framework in which In Place can be appreciated as a contribution to the contemporary ‘return to memory’.

The success of Philip Venables’ opera adaptation of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is underpinned by its powerful presentation of the play's text. This is predominantly facilitated by the other musical forces present, rather than through clever text-setting alone. Venables uses an array of timbral techniques, theatrical performance directions, referential sound effects, interactions with literary devices in the text and allusions to other musical genres in the opera to support and supplement his vocal writing. This article argues that the instrumental composition in 4.48 is critical in ensuring comprehension of the libretto and that, because of his working methods, Venables’ adaptation is faithful to Kane's sensitive play.

A recent exchange of emails with the composer Christopher Fox touched on Morton Feldman. Christopher commented, ‘My “problem” with Feldman, and it is just mine and not a problem, is that he was not an innovator; but has there ever been a conservative composer who took more risks?’. This led me to consider the value of innovation, the need for risk and the nature of the risks we take.

A critique of politically engaged art is that gallery-dwellers, concert-goers and theatre-lovers share the same political inclination as the artists. Often known as ‘preaching to the choir’, the critique holds that art's power to challenge and persuade is rendered valueless when it is experienced only by people who already hold the same (typically leftist) ideas. In this article I suggest three distinct yet interconnected responses to this critique: namely, ‘expanding’, ‘galvanising’ and ‘activating’ the choir. In the first part I explore ‘expanding’ and ‘galvanising’ through works by Stefan Prins, Sarah Nicolls, Pamela Z and Soosan Lolavar. In the second half I discuss how I ‘activate’ the choir in my own work.

Jane Manning's death, in March 2021, brought to an end a remarkable life and musical career, and it seems appropriate to celebrate that life with an extended tribute. TEMPO has always had a particularly close relationship with new music in Britain, where the journal is based, and Jane's work as a performer transformed the way in which musicians and audiences in Britain understood the technical and imaginative potential of new music. Her repertoire was enormous, and her interpretations of older music – Dallapiccola, Messiaen, Ravel, Webern – were wonderful, but it was as the creator of new work with living composers that she had such an extraordinary influence. What follows is an attempt to describe how that influence developed and to explain why it was so extraordinary.

The German composer Michael Maierhof took a curious and unusual path to becoming a professional composer, performer and concert organiser, one that gives him a unique perspective on the German art music scene. This interview with Maierhof took place on 17 January 2020 in Maierhof's apartment in Hamburg, Germany and forms part of my research into the artistic and socio-economic motivations that composers and artistic directors employ when utilizing a conductor. The interview explores his personal history, compositional techniques, and perspective on the course of contemporary musical history before going on to consider his views on conductor's responsibilities and their role in contemporary music.

The organising of tools, whether real or virtual, is an essential part of composition that is often overlooked. This article aims to generate a discussion about how a composer's working environment can permeate the compositional process and contribute to or inform their ideations. Central to this understanding, in terms of agency, has been to consider workflow as a subset of Actor–Network Theory. Here, a musical composition is viewed as a multiplicity of relationships between workflow and ideations, and suggests an expanded practice of musical creation that explores the various agencies that shape a composition. Nevertheless, this article is not intended as a comprehensive account, but only, as Bruno Latour would put it, ‘to add in a messy way to a messy account of a messy world’.

Although 2020 will mostly be remembered as a period of hiatus for music festivals, a period of relative stability during the summer in Estonia enabled the festival Glasperlenspiel to hold most of its 25th anniversary programme. The strict restrictions on travel and gatherings (limited to 2 people in March) were eased in May when Covid cases in Estonia went under 10 per 100,000. Travel from Finland opened without restrictions on June 15, and the festival organisers knew in May that public events would again be allowed as of July 1. They were cutting it rather close, as until 30 June public events were completely prohibited.