Immediately after the composition of the Gulyás cycle, Kurtág seems to have run into a second period of uncertainty as to how to proceed: this time understandably, since the Bornemisza cycle must have completely exhausted the obvious possibilities of what had started as a reductive language of bold, succinct gestures. True, the cycle had developed ways of expressive extension, but they were mostly sui generis, closely involved with the special qualities of Bornemisza's sermons. To have continued that line without self-repetition would perhaps have been impossible. The one obvious gain from the work, apart from the music itself of course, was the discovery of Kurtág's affinity with the voice and his evolution of a superbly versatile repertoire of vocal techniques and treatments.

This article is a response, informed by my own recent experience of tertiary education in the UK, as well as my work as a composer, performer, researcher and activist, to the collection of articles published in TEMPO 292 addressing issues of diversity in music-making and tertiary music education in Australia. Though interventions have been successful in achieving better gender representation across musical contexts in Australian higher education institutions, I bring into question the long-term legitimacy of such empirical or revisionist approaches. Drawing on a range of feminist, poststructural, queer, and decolonial thought, I explore how conventional approaches to tertiary music education – both in terms of pedagogical methods, as well as assumed or prioritised content – enforce hegemonic and exclusionary value systems, hierarchies, ontologies and epistemologies. I also problematise some of the ways in which neoliberal and capitalist frameworks have become embedded within tertiary music education and advocate a process of destabilising and decentring assumed parameters, outlining how a critical, political and radical approach to music education might look.

The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.

Close examination of John Adams's oeuvre reveals that symmetry is one of the predominant features of his music. Three common types of symmetry are encountered in Adams's works: reflection, translation and rotation. This article investigates these symmetries and tracks their development throughout Adams's compositional career. An analysis of selected works from the 1970s (China Gates and Phrygian Gates), 1980s (Grand Pianola Music and Fearful Symmetries) and 1990s (the Violin Concerto and Century Rolls) highlights the most pervasive symmetry in each decade and shows a shift from preconceived overarching symmetries that frame entire musical structures to smaller-level symmetries that affect the music at a level of phrase and motivic structure.

In analyzing any composition, we retrace certain moments in the creative process. It is wholly unimportant whether the work arose through the conscious application of some compositional principle, or purely intuitively (in which case we presume that the author himself ‘didn't notice’ it). If we can observe an underlying principle, it has an objective reality, and we are therefore fully justified in investigating it and regarding it as part of the compositional process. The deeper we penetrate the musical fabric of a work, the more subtle and profound are the principles we uncover. By its nature, genuine analysis seems almost a reconstruction of the original process of composition. It is true that we are often unable to establish the order in which various principles arose in the composer's mind; but this, in the long run, is not really essential.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a turning point in the history of modern music.

The excesses of the romanticists began to be unbearable for many. There were composers who felt: “this road does not lead us anywhere; there is no other solution but a complete break with the nineteenth century.”

Invaluable help was given to this change (or let us rather call it rejuvenation) by a kind of peasant music unknown up till then.

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.

Cat Hope's compositional practice is guided by a belief that music is inherently socially situated and can therefore be used as a tool for change. Through her 2019 opera Speechless Hope contributes to public discourse around the treatment of detainees in Australian offshore processing centres and engages more broadly with issues of nationality, human rights, displacement and the agency of voiceless minorities. This article demonstrates the way in which Hope presents identity in abstraction and complicates the binary of the self and the collective through musical acts of empathy. In doing so, she pioneers a new model which affords composers the ability to present progressive social arguments, crucial to a global political climate in desperate need of a recalibrated perspective of identity.

In 1989, I bought a CD in Paris of the early piano music of André Jolivet. Like many non-French musicians, I had read the name of Jolivet but heard little of his music. Jolivet's reputation as Varèse's leading pupil and the extreme avant-gardist of the pre-World War II group La Jeune France seemed completely at odds with his conventional post-War music occasionally broadcast on Radio 3, such as the Concertos for Trumpet, Piano or Ondes Martenot–music which suggested not fully assimilated influences of Honegger or Hindemith, with little obviously adventurous about it in its rhythmically conservative phrasing and standard formal shapes.

In the realm of art music, Leo Brouwer (1939-) is widely considered as the most significant living composer for the guitar. Since the latter part of the 20th century, students of the guitar at most, if not all, recognized music institutions have increasingly sought to perform Brouwer's works. Correspondingly, at the South African College of Music (University of Cape Town) respected instructors like Elspeth Jack, Neefa van der Schyff, and others, have over many years consistently and devotedly incorporated Brouwer's guitar literature into their teaching programmes. Cape Town's prized composer-conductor Alan Stephenson has similarly developed a keen interest in Brouwer's large-scale works, inspiring in 1998 a memorable rendition of Brouwer's acclaimed Elegiaco Concerto, performed by the talented soloist Christiaan Van der Vyver and the University of Cape Town Orchestra. In line with this, one of Brouwer's underlying goals has been to create works that are accessible to players of varying standards of performance. As a consequence, young, inexperienced, moderate, advanced as well as top internationally-acclaimed virtuosic players have all found some measure of contentment in performing Brouwer's guitar works.

Though in existence for less than a decade, Basle's Paul Sacher Foundation has already achieved an importance as a repository for the music of the 20th century comparable only to the importance of New York's Museum of Modern Art as a storehouse for representative masterpieces of this century's visual arts.

Most critical commentary concerning John Adams's 1987 opera Nixon in China focussed on the opera's first act, a parodistic reenactment of the well-known ceremonial scenes associated with the China visit. It appears that Nixon in China is an opera in the traditional mould as Richard Nixon steps down the gangway of the Spirit of 76 to a hero's welcome. Yet beneath this veneer of realism lie rich subtexts. It emerges that what is really going on is a parody (in the satiric sense) of a grand opera, a parody in which issues of cultural representation and gender politics are worked out. These themes are brought to the fore in Acts II and III but have been ignored in most critical commentaries.

• Los Angeles: John Adams's ‘The Gospel According to the Other Mary’ Michael Palmese

• London, Royal Opera House: Judith Weir's ‘Miss Fortune’ Paul Conway

• London, Coliseum: Detlev Glanert's ‘Caligula’ Guy Rickards

• London, Barbican Theatre: Glass's ‘Einstein on the Beach’ Keith Potter

• Birmingham, Symphony Hall: Jonathan Harvey's ‘Weltethos’ Arnold Whittall

• Further reports from Huddersfield, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham and London Paul Conway, Tim Mottershead, Peter Palmer, Jill Barlow

Music examples usually illustrate articles, but the present article is no more than an illustration appended to my analytic music example of the complete central song from Strawinsky's most recent composition (Spring, 1954), In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. I think that writers on music should be encouraged to keep to the music, and seriously contend that all the adverse critics of Schoenberg's serial technique, and most of the writers who pass for serial experts, are incapable of a serial analysis and have only the very vaguest notion of what makes a serial piece “tick.” They quote a bar or two—usually from the opening of Schoenberg's 4th Quartet—where the note-row is fairly obvious or, anyway, has previously been uncovered by someone else, and then proceed to let obscure theory take the place of clear if complex practice. The reason is simple: they don't hear the row, and if you are unable to imagine a row aurally, it is very difficult, usually indeed impossible, to trace it throughout a piece. Let me hasten to add that I should not dream of reproaching any critic with his tone-row-deafness if he left it at that: for all we know, he may otherwise be a musical genius. If, however, he professes to talk serial “shop” at the same time, I raise the strongest moral objections.

‘His Own Attempts at Explanation, just like his compositional work, lend themselves to misunderstanding’. This opinion dominates Webern literature now as in the past, though naturally not always in this formulation of Dohl's. Sometimes we read of contradictions, of imprecisions; errors of fact or of mental processes can be ‘demonstrated’; and, depending on the particular author's field of interest and study, these are treated with indulgence or gentle annoyance, with indignation or knowing dismissal. Who could expect of a composer—a composer, moreover, like Webern: naive, at times culpably naive, withdrawn from reality; with a music so ‘abstract’, so in need of help or redemption by means of interpretation—who could expect of such a composer pertinent and consistent, or at least apt, music-theoretical concepts or utterances? Hardly anyone, in fact, seems to have dared to expect this kind of thing of Webern so far. That this might indeed involve some daring can be recognized from the conditions, the fuss, and circumstance with which Webern is approached. Whether they have sprung from the soil of serial music or not, all the systematic investigations, the numbering of note-rows, classifying of pitches, durations and so on, considerations of ‘structure’ (many investigations, too, of ‘form’, of symmetries)—they all seem like precautions against the music. Since the music is not trusted, the traditional music-theoretical concepts presented by Webern (and Schoenberg, too) are also regarded as unsuited for coping with the music. Instead, attempts are made using, for instance, the idea of a cell (usually a three-note basic cell) and its metamorphoses—an idea which is at least as anachronistic as the traditional ones, is scarcely strong enough to bear the burden of explication, and is exactly as vulnerable to criticism on scientific and ideological grounds as a serious preoccupation with Webern's own statements is alleged to be.

The stylistic changes in György Ligeti's music since 1960 have in some ways mirrored those in the wider contemporary music world. In his music of the 1960s he displays an experimental and systematic approach to the exploration of sound matter which can also be seen in the contemporaneous music of composers such as Xenakis, Penderecki and Stockhausen. In the 1970s his music shows a more eclectic approach, particularly the opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7) in which there is much plundering of past styles – such as allusions to Monteverdi, Rossini, and Verdi. From this work onward there would appear to be a complete break from the approach in his works on the 1960s.

This year's Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music were plugged-in, wired-up, mixed-down, line-out. Scarcely a main-stage concert wasn't amplified, at the very least. More often, new works synthesised spatialised sound design, video material, lighting and electronics in high-tech, high-concept performances.

In recent years there has been an increase in the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of scholarly and popular writing on the histories of electronic music in Britain. In this literature, the contributions of Peter Zinovieff (b. 1933) and his computer-equipped electronic music studio to those histories have been variously exaggerated, underestimated and misreported. This article attempts to correct this misinformation, investigating Zinovieff's solo work and his collaborations with Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze and others, through a critical discussion of two recent contributions to the discourse surrounding the compositions realised at Zinovieff's EMS studio in the 1960s and 70s.