• Leon Kirchner David Matthews

• Begin Again: John Cage Rodney Lister

• Schuman, Persichetti, Mennin Bret Johnson

• Twelve-tone Dallapiccola Tim Mottershead

Prophetic words written by the Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee to his friend Aaron Copland, after McPhee had returned to Bali in 1937 from a hiatus in his eight-year stay there. The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering sounds and supple swing, became the center of Colin McPhee's life long before the study of musical exotica came into fashion for Western composers. McPhee's work in the East was pioneering, not just in the considerable substance of his Bali-inspired research, writings, and compositions, but in the ecumenical attitude that it helped to inspire about Asian musics and the rich potential they hold for the West. McPhee, together with Henry Cowell, Henry Eichheim, Harry Partch, and a few other Americans of his generation, took decisive steps across Western boundaries and into the whole world of music.

New Music thought and compositional praxis has excessively focused inward as a source of inspiration. In the last ten years, multidisciplinary composition has offered one possible solution to this problem. By combining music with theatrical elements and digital media, composers have produced works that are ‘not for the ears alone’. This paper offers a typification of its most novel aspects, and traces them in the author's own creative work, which additionally include the use of borrowed material as a means for establishing referentiality and elaborating semantic narratives.

A performer of Luigi Nono's late works is often faced with crucial questions regarding interpretation and technical details. An important tradition has evolved in performing these works, nevertheless it is not always easy to find the necessary information to play them adequately. This article attempts to answer some of the technical and interpretational questions in the context of Das atmende Klarsein and A Pierre – Dell'Azzurro silenzio, inquietum. Our hope is that it will contribute to the discussion about authenticity and freedom of interpretation and provide flutists with practical information not found in the scores.

John Cage’s stated opinion regarding the original version of Cheap Imitation – for solo piano – was that it constituted a breach with what he considered the proper role of the composer to be. Despite the fact that the actual pitch content of Cheap Imitation was derived through consultations with the I Ching, and that the rhythmic and metric structures were appropriated from Satie, Cage reserved for himself a great deal of composerly control dictated only by his personal taste: the particular kind of control which, in 1970, ran counter to what he had been doing and writing about for years. In this sense, Cheap Imitation represents a watershed point in Cage’s career, away from the radical indeterminacy of the 1960s and back toward more traditional ideas of notation and composition, containing a balance between elements that are systematized, appropriated, and randomly generated. The work as a whole does not simply re-embrace determinate notation, though Cage’s composed choices are strikingly reminiscent of similar processes from his much earlier works. As William Brooks notes, ‘Cheap Imitation looks and sounds far more like pieces from the early 1940s than like any of its immediate predecessors.’

The subject indicated by my title is probably the obscurest in the whole of musicography. I say “musicography,” not “music,” because musically it is not, in my submission, obscure at all; it is merely complex. But musicians do not tend to write, and musicographers do not tend to hear.

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.

I am no believer in historical determinism, nor am I a Scottish (or any other kind of) nationalist, but the fact that The Sixteen should commission James MacMillan to set anew the text used by Robert Carver in his 19-part motet O bone Jesu brings a profound satisfaction. No one else could have tidied up five-centuries-old loose ends as he. Carver (c. 1487–1566) was part of the dizzyingly rich flourishing of Scottish culture in the early years of the 16th century – a Catholic culture, doused by the dour sincerity of the Reformation (the MacTaliban, if you wish). MacMillan, a dry-eyed member of Scotland's Catholic minority, is the first composer since those days whose combination of faith and accomplishment allows him to pick up the glove torn from Carver's hand. His O bone Jesu – given its first public airing by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Chistophers at Southwark Cathedral on 10 October, at the outset of a year-long tour that takes them round the British Isles and to North America – may not quite reach Carver's Olympian heights (no other Scottish composer has achieved commensurate greatness) but it exploits a striking range of emotional reference nonetheless.

When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.

Sir James MacMillan's Symphony No. 4 is claimed by the composer as an abstract work, but a clear programme is discernible through the use of references to the Roman Catholic Mass. MacMillan uses Gregorian chant, quotations from Robert Carver's Missa Dum sacrum mysterium (c. 1523) and his own St Luke Passion (2015) to create a liturgical form for the symphony. These allusions and their presentation in the symphony can be fruitfully understood in relation to Catholic theologies of time and the Eucharist. When allusions to sonata form are also taken into consideration, the result is a complex interaction between different experiences of time in the symphony's span.

The centenary year of one of the giants of 20th-century music has been and gone. It was all but ignored, so far as the UK is concerned, by his publishers, the musical establishment, the BBC etc. There had been vague plans to mount a number of relatively large-scale performances and broadcasts, to stage his two short operas for the first time and so on. They vanished. Music is a business like any other. Under the auspices of the Stefan Wolpe Society (USA), his daughter, the pianist Katharina Wolpe, managed to put together a short series of concerts in London recently, in which a few of his works received staggering performances before a very few people. The last of these, which would have seen the first performance for 2–3 decades of Wolpe's enormous Enactments for 3 pianos – had to be abandoned at the last minute for sudden lack of funds!

David Matthews has asked us to correct an inadvertent error in his First Performance review of Pavel Novák's Preludes and Fugues performed by William Howard (p. 34). The statement that the work lasts 17 minutes is incorrect: the actual duration is about 80 minutes.

The following interview with Pierre Boulez contains arresting statements from the composer, casting new light on his musical and historical thinking. New insights emerge in an elaborate discussion of his compositional techniques in Pli selon pli and other main works. Surprising to some readers, Boulez the modernist here admits his constant dependence on personal choices and musical taste. He gives his views on modernism's intriguing relation to the classical musical tradition. He describes the cultural situation immediately following the Second World War and he discusses the complex relation between ‘life’ and ‘work’. Boulez takes up his experience as a conductor and points to the influence of Wagner, Debussy, and Mahler on his later conception of musical form. He finally airs his opinions on some lighter issues like Parisian culture, early music, rock, and opera.

(The following conversation between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Juan María Solare took place in Kiirten – the small village near Cologne, Germany, where he has lived for many years – on 7 August 1998, during the ‘Stockhausen-Kurscn 1998’. The intention of these courses was, in his own (messianic) words: ‘Forward what I've tried to explain to your own students, wherever you work’. Through a whole week numerous pieces of Stockhausen had been performed in Kiirten, including several of his early works, composed almost half a century ago.)

While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context, and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself. This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic music offered as examples.