Composers in academic institutions are increasingly required to describe their activities in terms of ‘research’ – formulating ‘research questions’, ‘research narratives’, ‘aims’ and ‘outcomes’. Research plans and funding applications require one to specify the nature of the original contribution that will be made by a piece of music, even before it is composed. These requirements lead to an emphasis on collaborative work, technology and superficial novelty of format. Yet the very idea that musical composition is a form of research is a category error: music is a domain of thought whose cognitive dimension lies in embodiment, revelation or presentation, but not in investigation and description. It is argued here that the idea of composition as research is not only objectively false but inimical to genuine musical originality.

While some research results from consistent processes, careful methodologies and detailed planning, much practice-based research resists these strategies, privileging knowledge that remains complex and unstable. This knowledge frequently sits outside sequences of analysis, such as testing or deduction. Yet there is nothing new about the kind of knowledge that resists clarity. In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John O'Neal argues for complexity and confusion as essential parts of an Enlightenment project in writing from the eighteenth century, and claims that authors pursued these strategies ‘because they preferred in certain ways to see confusion, not order, as representative of a dynamic new state of mind and society awaiting discovery’. Alongside O'Neal's work, this article considers Gemma Fiumara's The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, in which confusion is also central. The article explores these ideas in connection with a performance of Michael Finnissy's Confusion in the Service of Discovery. It argues for confusion as a positive aspect of research from beginning to end, rather than as a circumscribed phase that precedes outcomes. The inclusion of a musical performance demonstrates (performs) the different theoretical languages that the prose describes.

This article explores the use of innovatory tonal relations in the music of the American composer Ben Johnston (b. 1926). Johnston's use of a microtonal tuning system employing scales and intervals in extended just intonation is described, and passages from several of his compositions (especially String Quartets nos 2 and 5) are analysed to show the use of these pitch resources in practice. The article also situates Johnston's contribution in the context of older theories of harmony and the mechanics of pitch perception.

Philip Glass is so prolific a composer that it is tempting to wonder whether he has become entrapped by his trademark restlessly repeating patterns. At the age of 77, there is no diminution of his prodigious energy; The Trial brings his tally of operas to some 30 since he first shot to fame – or notoriety – with Einstein on the Beach in 1976. Glass is, in effect, an iconoclast-turned-icon, and he is now by far the most performed contemporary composer of opera on the planet.

2014, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's 80th birthday year, witnessed a plethora of events celebrating his music, from the Barbican's ‘Birtwistle at 80’ series to the ‘In Broken Images’ concerts at the Southbank Centre. Included in the latter was the UK premiere of his new concerto for piano and orchestra, Responses: Sweet disorder and the carefully careless, performed on 6 December 2014 by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Vladimir Jurowski. Birtwistle describes the concerto as addressing the problem of ‘the relationship between the piano and the orchestra’, with the subtitle (taken from essays by architect Robert Maxwell) expressing the ‘essence’ of his composition.

‘The East is a career’, states Mr Coningsby somewhat laconically to Lord Henry Sydney in Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 novel Tancred. This line was (perhaps more famously) employed as an epigram by Edward Said in his Orientalism, which made a prescient and penetrating historical critique of the West's portrayal of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures as exotic ‘others’.

hcmf// 2014 kicked off with a typically tough and knotty concert from Petr Kotik's chamber orchestra Ostravská banda, who performed a collection of UK premieres for small ensemble by Christian Wolff, three Czech composers and another American. The concert was billed as a tribute to Wolff, who was in attendance and who celebrates his eightieth birthday this year, and this acknowledgement of his status as one of the few remaining high modernists allowed the festival to begin with a celebration of the music with which it has been most closely associated. First up was Wolff's 37 Haiku, a setting of a poem (or 37 poems) by John Ashbery, sung by Thomas Buckner with an accompanying ensemble of oboe, horn, viola and cello. Like the poems, Wolff's settings are self-contained but accumulative, and, as the composer says in the programme notes, the ‘may form’ a whole. Variety is achieved through shifts within the accompanying instrumentation (some settings having none), line and fragmentation, instrumental technique, suggestions of common-practice harmony, flashes of word painting and spoken accompaniment from the instrumentalists (one haiku is spoken by the violinist, another is spoken in fragments across the ensemble). Coherence across these fragments is created simply through the presence of Wolff's mature and distinctive post-Webern sound world.

hcmf// continued its tradition of Monday's concerts being free and consisting of shorter concerts resulting from a competitive selection process. Many of the concerts had full audiences, and it is an achievement of the festival that these ‘shorts’ are seen as concerts on a par with their paid counterparts on other days. The audiences were notably more diverse on the Monday, with more students and families present, resulting in a more informal, but no less engaging, performance environment.

As a result of her wonderfully exciting performance of Unsuk Chin's Etudes at hcmf//'s ‘free Monday’ in 2013, Singaporean pianist Mei Yi Foo was invited back for her own concert this year. Given the depth, intensity and diversity of the works in her mid-week recital, it was surprising to discover that she is not a contemporary music specialist. Richard Baker's Breaking The Ground (2003) contrasted furious bass material, rhythmic and syncopated, with gentler, higher-register patterns, freer rhythmically but on repetition becoming more energised. These distinct materials are gradually drawn together, exploiting the range of the keyboard and creating a very satisfying organic unity. Thomas Adès's Still Sorrowing (1992) is an early work by the composer, its Cagean preparations gradually removed by the page-turner towards the end; a fey, elusive, dream-like piece, it shows the questionable fluidity of conception that is a hallmark of the composer's style. Jukka Tiensuu's Fantango (1984) was a powerfully swinging entertainment; despite their title and miniaturism, Kurtág's Játékok (Games) were more substantial, the pianist providing a delightfully characterful account of the concluding ‘derangement’ of Mad Girl With Flaxen Hair.

Sunglasses forever raised, a slowly fading graffito of Igor Stravinsky looks out from an old wooden door into the streets of Huddersfield. This feels appropriate en route to an hcmf// event, but when coming home from a thoroughly un-Stravinskian concert at midnight, passing bars bursting with young clubbers, his harsh stare disconcerts.