Peter Bürger's critique of the historical avant garde (in Theory of the Avant Garde) accounts for its ineffectual nature as a political movement because of its relationship with institutions. He argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology, and as a facet of the understanding of the ‘historicity of aesthetic categories’. The influence of institutions on music since 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant garde. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘exform’ re-conceives the avant garde as outside of institutions and an idea of ‘progress’ that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. He frames the task of the avant-garde artist as giving energy to ‘waste’, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to ‘bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible’. This article explores the exform with respect to the work of the British composer Chris Newman and the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the present.

The composer Allison Cameron (b. 1963) lives in Toronto. Her music has been widely performed at festivals such as Emerging Voices in San Diego, Evenings of New Music in Bratislava, Festival SuperMicMac in Montréal, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, New Music across America, Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, New York, and Rumori Dagen in Amsterdam. A dedicated performer of experimental music in Toronto, Allison co-founded the Drystone Orchestra (1989) and the Arcana Ensemble (1992). She has been improvising since 2000 on banjo, ukulele, cassette tapes, radios, miscellaneous objects, mini amplifiers, crackle boxes, toys and keyboards, in collaboration with Éric Chenaux, the Draperies, Ryan Driver, Dan Friedman, Mike Gennaro, Kurt Newman, John Oswald, Stephen Parkinson and Mauro Savo, among other musicians. In that same year she became Artistic Director of Toronto's experimental ensemble Arraymusic, a position she held for five years. In 2007, she founded the Allison Cameron Band with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, and in 2009, the trio c_RL with Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet) and Germaine Liu (drums). Allison has experimented with graphic and notational scores that will soon be gathered and published as a collection. Additionally, she is the winner of the 2018 KM Hunter Award for music in Ontario.

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.

This article is devoted to the music of Paweł Szymański. The author is convinced that an intertextual reading of his music is the most compelling one. Taking into consideration Szymański's two-level technique she interprets his works by means of categories elaborated in the field of literature: intertextuality exponent, interpretant, and text characterised by intertextual play. In the second part of the article two different works are discussed, the first representing the algorithmic, and the second the improvisational method of composing. The author concludes that these works are deeply rooted in tradition and, at the same time, are modern, as well as original, with the interpretants constituting the major source of their originality.

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.

This article is based on a lecture given on 28 April 2018 as the keynote address at the inaugural conference of CenM@S, the Centre for New Music at Sheffield University. It offers a series of reflections on time and musical composition, time being considered both in the sense of history – our present sense of the past – and experiential time as we listen to music. Specific reference is made to the author's Canti del carcere (2012–18) and the texts by Gramsci and Dante that are set in these madrigals, each of which is also concerned with the passage of time and the ways in which ideas become consolidated. Ideas of time and history in the music of Cage, Nono and Feldman are also considered.

Over the last decade, Larry Goves, composer and lecturer of music at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), has been steadily enriching the experimental music community in Manchester, UK. As an artistic director and curator, Goves regularly presents his and other's work through the ensemble The House of Bedlam, the annual New Music North West festival, and the Decontamination series. This review covers the twelfth and thirteenth instalments of the Decontamination series, presented as a double-bill at RNCM's Carol Nash Recital Room on 28 February 2018.

Johannes Kreidler has written an opera. This is, alongside Alexander Schubert making Ensemble Intercontemporain sync up to strobe lights and Jennifer Walshe making Lucas Fels do a silly dance, a symptom of the inevitable institutionalisation of former iconoclasts who less than half a decade ago were still being championed as figures who, in Michael Rebhahn's polemic terms, ‘resigned from New Music’. But Kreidler does not seem to feel threatened by this. Indeed, his willingness to adopt the official genre of opera without qualification – in contrast to Ferneyhough's ‘thought opera’, Lachenmann's ‘musik mit Bildern’, and the more common designations of ‘music theatre’ or ‘musical action’ – signifies just how comfortable he is with his position as an established composer.

Growing out of Soundpool, a York-based composer/performer collective of the 1980s, Late Music York has been promoting new music in York for over 20 years. Composers and commissions featured in their concerts have included Frederic Rzewski, Michael Finnissy, Judith Weir, Anna Meredith and Howard Skempton. Their latest series is equally broad, with music ranging from David Bowie to Tristan Murail (not forgetting younger local composers); the series can never be accused of having a narrow agenda. This review aims to contrast two separate events to give an idea of the range and variety one has come to expect from Late Music concerts.

For one week in March, a bitterly cold Berlin became a hotspot for hard-hitting, radical and politically engaged music making, as MaerzMusik welcomed some of the most forward-thinking composers, performers, speakers and thinkers through its doors. With by far the most representation across the week's events, it was composer/producer/DJ/transgender activist Terre Thaemlitz who assumed the role of unofficial artist-in-residence, with her appearances spanning two concerts, a talk, a DJ set (under pseudonym DJ Sprinkles) and a 30-hour performance of his latest album Soullessness, which was installed over the festival's opening weekend at the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

Simon Løffler's b presents to its audience an immediate question: where are the instruments? Three players sit on straight-backed chairs, joined by a daisy-chain of cables and guitar stomp boxes. The score directs a choreography of foot switching, demanding extraordinary pedal dexterity. Sounds pass down the line, modulated by distortion and equaliser effects, before bursting out of the PA in a series of abrupt electrical barks. But at the other end of the line there is nothing but an unplugged jack, held aloft, inserted nowhere but the open air.

‘Music is a dark world of meaningless abstraction, of memory and longing.’ These words by Niels Rønsholdt boldly opened his new opera Gaze for Gaze, created collaboratively with the ensemble and music theatre collective SCENATET. Gaze for Gaze was one of the cornerstones of SPOR's 2018 programming, shown three times to an intimate sold-out audience of around 40 people. The piece's clever twist – text was delivered by audience members sitting in a circle around the work's two lead performers, with the rest of the musicians performing behind the audience – brought to the fore many of SPOR's curatorial themes: absence, substitution, and darkness.

Visiting Borealis for two of its five-day stretch in March, I encountered a festival that offered a refreshingly diverse take on the field of experimental music – diverse not only in terms of who is making it (the festival actively works towards equality of representation) but also in the practices represented. Indeed, perhaps a majority of the works presented in the festival intersected with fields of artistic activity outside of conventional musical performance.

‘Gently rumbling without direction’, a programme note appended to the first part of Cassandra Miller's solo for piano Philip the Wanderer, might equally have stood in as descriptor for tonight's programme tout court. This is not meant as a criticism. Time's arrow, the vector of narratives real or implied, may well be the most burdensome yet most easily sloughed off (and perhaps least missed) item of nineteenth-century baggage to be jettisoned by composers over the last century or so. What tonight's collaboration between An Assembly and Ensemble x.y (led and programmed by the increasingly omnipresent wunderkind of British new music, Jack Sheen) offered up was a quite different approach, a different way through the passage of time. Less music as organised sound; more sound in itself a means for organising time.

On the 13 May 2018, under the beautiful, celestial, fresco ceiling of the city's opera house, the highly acclaimed Oper Stuttgart produced a captivating revival of composer Mark Andre's Wunderzaichen (2008–2014; Wunder, ‘miracle’, and Zaichen, old German for ‘sign’). The protagonist, ‘Johannes’, is a ‘speech role’, and André Jung met the challenge with a modest, yet rigorous, intellect. Julia Bauer, as ‘Maria’, displayed a sensitive and virtuosic vocal ability. The orchestra, under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling, mastered the majestically complex signatures of Andre's soundworld with commendable accuracy and a fluid simplicity.