Christopher Butterfield is a composer and composition teacher. His music has been performed across Canada and in Europe, with recordings on the CBC, Artifact, and Collection QB labels. He is currently the Director of the School of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. Christopher was born in 1952 in Vancouver, BC. He studied composition at the University of Victoria with Rudolf Komorous and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with Bülent Arel. He was a performance artist, rock guitar player and composer while living in Toronto between 1977 and 1992, after which he returned to the University of Victoria as Assistant Professor of Composition.

I studied composition with Christopher between 2000 and 2005. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with him in Victoria. During our interview, I asked him about his life and work, and for his thoughts on how Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous has influenced composition in Canada over the last few decades.

In 2014 composer, flutist and director of Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel, Cat Hope, sought to commission a work from Éliane Radigue. During discussions, Radigue proposed a collaborative composition with another composer, performer and lead interpreter of her acoustic work, Carol Robinson. The result was Radigue's first co-composed work, and the first work by Radigue for an Australian group. Robinson came to Australia to work directly with the Decibel ensemble for a nine-day development phase that culminated in a thirty-minute acoustic work, part of the OCCAM series, for flute, clarinet, percussion, viola and cello. Each OCCAM work is completely defined, and yet never exactly reproducible, because the particular interaction between sound, instrument, musician and acoustics requires constant adaptation. The process of developing the work, though extremely demanding, was fascinating and thoroughly rewarding because it obliges the performer to enter into a state of hyper acuteness, sensitivity and in some ways, belief. The musician is guided toward a level of awareness and reactivity that increases as the sound material itself is assimilated. It is never a question of replicating an event or sequence, but rather of understanding the elements that created the event and then allowing those elements to develop further. This article discusses the unique process involved in the elaboration of this new work and how it differs from the development of previous OCCAM pieces. It is written in the voices of both the commissioner, Cat Hope (main text), and the co-composer of the work, Carol Robinson (indented text in italics).

The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent institutionalisation of post-serial and other avant-garde thinking meant that approaches to other kinds of modernism – and whether or not ostensibly postmodernist approaches could be included in such categories – only gradually came to be employed, during the course of the 1990s. This article discusses the work of four composers, Luís Tinoco, Nuno Côrte-Real, Eugénio Rodrigues and Tiago Cutileiro, as part of this context. Their approaches are radically different from each other, but each of these four demonstrates an engagement with compositional approaches from outside what Paulo Ferreira de Castro calls the ‘sacralised avant-garde’ that is proof of the remarkable stylistic expansion evident in contemporary composition in Portugal during recent decades which is, in its turn, closely intertwined with a perceptible aesthetic and philosophical broadening in the teaching of the subject.

This article questions the narrow representation of the history of much early British electronic music, and challenges the way historians and writers have tended to cherry-pick and lionize certain individuals, while ignoring all the others that fall outside of the limited and regularly repeated version of events. It is an extension of the research presented in my compendium Tape Leaders, conceived during 2010 with the aspiration to catalogue all the early British electronic music composers who became active before 1970, presenting a biographical entry for as many experimenters as I could trace and documenting more than 100 individuals, including hobbyist tape activists, who have never before received recognition. Tape Leaders presents a completely different picture to the consensus that positions the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a handful of others, at the centre of electronic activity in Britain, with allegedly very little else happening until universities caught on at the end of the 1960s and began to offer courses and studio facilities.

This article serves as an overview of Jakob Ullmann's voice, books and FIRE series, providing an examination of the cycle's scores, and the fragmented memories contained within. voice, books and FIRE stands monolithically in the composer's catalogue. The music – Ullmann refers to it as an ‘imaginary folklore’ – is presented through an elaborate notational system: partly effaced by layers of religious iconography, abstract imagery and fragments of religious texts and lists of names. The series (currently unfinished) serves as an elaborate memorial to the victims of Stalinist persecution as well as the demise of religious and cultural traditions across European history. In Ullmann's most ambitious and striking body of work to date, the score is encountered as a palimpsest – an overlaying and effacement of memory. The notion of the palimpsest is also traced through the music's performance and subsequent recording, assessing Ullmann's use of extreme quietness – a partial erasure – as a destabilising force for the performers, which ultimately renders the work fragile.

In response to Paul Valéry's words after the First World War in La Crise de l'esprit – ‘We later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’ – the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler remarks, in his own chapter entitled ‘Apocalypse Without God’ in his What Makes Life Worth Living,

On the evening of 18 April 2017, the world premiere of Chaya Czernowin's highly anticipated new opera, Infinite Now, was performed at Vlaamse Opera Ghent, Belgium. The ambience of the venue was buzzing, highly charged, electrical – a visceral state that seemed contextually appropriate for the lengthy 2.5-hour experience (without intermission) ahead. Programmed as part of the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen 2016–17 ‘Borderline’ series, the set-up and contour of the pre-concert events became eerily symbolic: a large, grandiose, guarded door separated the rooms holding the press conference and pre-concert lecture, through which the composer would eventually pass toward the latter to conclude: ‘[t]he power to continue, that is what [the opera] is all about. It is not the power to be happy or to be sad. … It is much more morass, elemental and existential. The power to continue’. In an instant, the strong ring of emergency sirens then happened to pierce and penetrate from the world beyond – a rather poignant signal to declare the doors to the first performance officially open.

For those who, consciously or not, have come to associate today's exploratory music with small ensembles, electronics or performative physicality, the symphony orchestra can seem an unlikely source of new horizons. The orthodoxy of the concert hall, the uniforms, the absorption of human performers into an abstract whole, the stasis of musicians and audience: these aren't new anxieties but they persist in interesting ways.

One particularly engaging historical inquiry at Maerzmusik 2017 was the concert titled Re-inventing Smetak, a concert with two documentary interludes on Brazil-based composer and instrument builder Walter Smetak, as well as premieres of commissions of living composers to write for his instruments, most notably Liza Lim's Ronda – The Spinning World, which integrated Smetak's conceptualisation of the world as ‘polarities of energy flowing across and spiraling around axes of evolution and he built his instruments or Plásticas Sonoras (sound sculptures) to express his complex symbology of spiritual relations’. ‘Across and spiraling around axis of evolution’ referred in part to the sprawling percussion-instrument tree in the centre of the stage with branches of tiny percussion objects dangling from its limbs, and a few scattered barrel-like instruments that made ratchet-like noises when they were turned and rotated by the percussionists. Percussion is already so varied nowadays that one isn't easily engaged by undiscovered instruments from the past, yet Lim's piece also included some sensitive, signature string writing and was able to incorporate Smetak's percussion instruments and jangle and rattle and integrate them at significant formal moments – navigating the physical spectacle on stage and navigating a tricky compositional assignment.

In London the bank – as a building, its symbolism and its position within the cityscape – is sacrosanct. In Oslo banks become arts venues. Although it is moving soon to new premises being built further up the waterfront, the National Museum of Contemporary Art is currently housed in a former bank. A few blocks away is Sentralen, a relatively new, multi-purpose performance arts space, meeting place, restaurant and bar.

March 18 was the first-ever World Toy Piano Day, and what better occasion for a concert showcasing this intriguing instrument. The pianist Xenia Pestova hosted Non-Piano at IKLECTIK Art Lab; the toy piano naturally took centre stage, with guest appearances from other non-piano keyboard instruments. IKLECTIK was an inspired venue – cosy without being cramped, with an acoustic that could accommodate both intimate whisperings and all-engulfing sound worlds. Pestova performed in every piece and was also a very charming host, establishing an informal tone from the get-go. No programmes (a boon! – no rustling), so everything was announced, with explanation of gestation and performance history. The relaxed surroundings well suited the exploratory and educational nature of the evening.

The easiest part of running a new music group in Britain is probably the beginning. You gather some like-minded musicians, make a programme, find a venue and perform. After that it gets harder: establishing a reputation, persuading someone to fund you, negotiating with promoters, maintaining the commitment of your musicians, keeping going year after year. But EXAUDI have done much more than just keep going: they have established new standards for what an ensemble of solo voices can achieve and championed a host of spectacularly ambitious, beautiful, challenging works, both their own commissions and revivals of music waiting for a group of this quality to come along. Their fifteenth birthday is, then, something to celebrate, and the Wigmore Hall an ideal venue in which to celebrate a consort of beautifully blended voices.