Aaron Einbond was born in New York in 1978. He received his compositional education in the US (Harvard, University of California, Berkeley), the UK (Cambridge, Royal College of Music) and France (IRCAM), and his teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion and Philippe Leroux. He currently teaches music composition, sound and technology at City University, London. He is interested in applications of technology within instrumental music, and almost all of his works combine electronics and acoustic instruments. Since 2007 – beginning with his piece Beside Oneself for viola and electronics (first performed by Ellen Ruth Rose), composed while studying at the University of California, Berkeley – he has also used audio analysis and retrieval software to transcribe recorded sounds into instrumental notation.

Einbond's interest in phonographic transcription connects his work to that of other composers of his generation, including Patricia Alessandrini, Joanna Bailie, Richard Beaudoin and Cassandra Miller. (It also finds precedents in a wider musical interest in forms of transcription that one can find in the music of composers as diverse as Peter Ablinger, Luciano Berio and Michael Finnissy.) What makes Einbond's work distinctive is his focus on timbre as a musical parameter, rather than more abstract or easily quantifiable values such as pitch.

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.

On 27 August 2018, the first Women Composers Meeting (中堅女性作曲家サミット vol. 1) was held at the Social Business Lab in Tokyo as part of the Project PPP Summer Composition Academy. Eight Japanese women composers in their mid-thirties to early forties were invited to speak: Noriko Koide, Yu Kuwabara, Tomoko Momiyama, Chikako Morishita (moderator), Akiko Ushijima, Ai Watanabe, Yukiko Watanabe, and Akiko Yamane. This article is a compilation drawn from their three-hour discussion as well as from the opening and closing dialogues. All conversations were held in Japanese and are here translated for publication by the author with the aid of Michiko Saiki.

The music of British-Albanian composer Thomas Simaku (b. 1958) bears the hallmarks of both his formative training and working life in Albania, and the widening of musical palette that came with his move to the UK in 1991. In this article the music from the late 1990s to the present day is considered, with particular attention to more recent works. An overview of some stylistic and technical aspects of this music is offered through analytical observations centred on three dualities: simplicity and complexity, the individual and the group, and stasis and movement. This wide-ranging account aims to open the door for further scholarship around this rich and multifaceted music.

As my own practice as a performer has evolved, I have found myself seeking out new forms of collaboration, hoping to fuel my development and increase my sense of agency. This is, in some ways, a high-risk strategy: collaborative practices are, after all, a journey into the unknown precisely because of the bringing together of discrete elements, and with meaningful sharing comes vulnerability. What I hadn't anticipated was how many conversations I would find myself having about the ways in which the traditional models of, for example, commissioning, promotion, authorship or payment fail to serve, let alone nurture, true collaboration. This short article is a re-working of a position paper I presented at Southampton University in February 2019 as part of a Hartley Residency there that I used to explore the hot topic of ‘collaboration’. The main part of my residency was a paper I wrote entitled ‘The voice that calls the hand to write: exploring the adventure of agency and authorship within collaborative partnerships’. That paper was an opportunity for me to dig into what this buzziest of words, ‘collaboration’, actually means and to organise some of my thinking on the topic. What follows here is a gentle and rather personal musing on why and how we might want to share the spoils of a shared practice, and what some of the institutional obstacles to this desire might be.

Although it is a mistake to believe that the material traces left by a composer's practice can help us to properly reconstruct the creative process, compositional sketches may throw light on it. Nevertheless many such accounts take their respective case studies as isolated objects that are, unfortunately, sometimes decontextualised from the whole record of their authors. Ethnography potentially offers a better methodology and auto-ethnographic accounts, third party observations, and mixtures of these approaches have already been applied to contemporary music. This article aims to combine both these approaches in a discussion of a recent compositional project at IRCAM, carried out by a team of three people. I consider how the previous artistic experiences and achievements of these people, jointly and separately, have had a substantial impact on their shared project. In addition, as the case study had a scientific underpinning, I comment on the cognitive bridge that the composer had to build between scientific and musical conceptions.

Zubin Kanga has about as wide a range of performance experience as one can get playing recently written art music – his bio mentions collaborations with contemporary warhorses like Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, and Steve Reich – but as a solo performer he has cultivated a distinctive and specialised practice that maps onto the wider action of international New Music in increasingly fascinating ways. For the past few years, his solo tours have showcased an expanded practice which binds the performer to one or another technological apparatus that centrally determines the form and execution of the piece, raising questions of autonomy, authorship and identity. These concerns are reflected in the titles of the tours: ‘Dark Twin’, ‘Cyborg Pianist’ and, currently, ‘Piano Ex Machina’.

Melting blocks of ice drip from the ceiling. Sounds of wind, rain, and shrieking howls accompanied by rasping trombone pedal tones and wailing clarinet glissandi build to a cacophony of death-noises. ‘Oh, enough local colour’, retorts Hel.