This article is a reflection on aspects of the compositional practice and aesthetics of the American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987) as viewed from the perspective of a fellow composer. Writing as a colleague immersed in Feldman's work for more than three decades, Kevin Volans discusses Feldman's concepts of time and form; his approach to touch on the piano, and to instrumentation and tone colour generally; his relationship with the visual arts; his notational practices with regard to pitch and rhythm; his anti-conceptualist standpoint, and much else.

French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

Ligeti has largely been understood as an opponent of serialism, though he was deeply entangled with the mid-century Darmstadt avant-garde in the late 1950s and 1960s. As such, appearances of twelve-tone techniques in his works are typically dismissed as borrowed, superficial or juvenile. This article synthesises previous research, original analysis and sketch materials to reassess Ligeti's engagement with dodecaphonic techniques. The Kyrie movement is steeped in Webernian dodecaphony, from the foundational plan to the surface expression of the vocal melodies. Ligeti's use of palindromes also harkens to Bartók's music. In this sense, the Kyrie movement of the Requiem can be understood as a eulogy for both Webern and Bartók, as well as for the dodecaphonic techniques that intrigued Ligeti even as his compositional technique moved far beyond them.

Piers Hellawell is Professor of Composition at Queen's University, Belfast and one of the United Kingdom's most interesting and thoughtful composers. In this interview he speaks about his compositional interests and preoccupations through a discussion of his works and technical features such as his ‘escalator series’. He also speaks about his concerns for composition as a discipline in universities and schools.

Indifferent to the aesthetic dispute between the Parisian musique concrète and the Cologne elektronische Musik schools in the mid twentieth century, Mauricio Kagel took a synthetic approach to his second electroacoustic composition Antithese by combining these compositional principles. His aim was not to offer an eclectic solution to the controversy, but to express his musico-political and musico-social commentary. A close observation of Kagel's sketches, archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, suggests that his choice of compositional materials and painstaking structural plan were shaped by his critical view of the politics of electroacoustic music.

It's not the premiere of every Polish symphony that's greeted by a near sell-out audience at the Royal Festival Hall, but then it's not every composer whose previous symphony had the success of Henryk Górecki's Third, his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The Upshaw/London Sinfonietta/Zinman recording of this work has sold over a million copies.

In basing his first opera on Sophocles' Thebans trilogy, heard at the ENO on 3 May 2014 in a condensed three-act version, one act per play, Julian Anderson shows his colours as something of a classicist. No postmodern pastiche nor quasi-medieval dramatic innovations for him, as we've seen from near British contemporaries Mark-Anthony Turnage and George Benjamin, nor the technological and dramaturgical explorations of other recent ENO productions, from Two Boys to Satyagraha to A Dog's Heart. No, this is a composer with his feet firmly planted in the grand operatic tradition of classical subjects and traditional telling.

Clicks haunt much of Michel van der Aa's music, often embedded in thick referential networks. In One, the pervasive clicks, both live and pre-recorded, sometimes come from a flashlight and sometimes from twigs snapping; similarly, in Sunken Garden, a character in the film nervously flicks a business card against his hand, this minor gesture imbuing the score with one of its most distinctive sounds. But in both these compositions (and in many other van der Aa works) the clicks share another connotation: they are also the awkward, glitchy sound of recorded music, either gone wrong or mid-edit. It's an unmistakable reference for twenty-first-century ears – our experience with recordings has changed the way we hear the click.

There was a pleasantly informal atmosphere at The Print Room during the premiere run of Opera Erratica's new Triptych this May. Comprising three short operas for voices and electronics, Triptych presented a new interpretation of contemporary chamber opera, incorporating elements of multimedia – including live video and photographic projections – alongside elements of more traditional art forms, such as a strikingly cartoonish set by the Young British Artist Gavin Turk.

For this Norwegian music critic, visiting a German music festival always means excitement and great expectations for, given its long traditions and proud institutions, German musical life has a special attraction. However, the reality may sometimes be quite astonishing. So it was that after about an hour on the train from Düsseldorf Airport, climbing down the steps at Witten Hauptbahnhof, I couldn't help asking myself, ‘How can it be that this rather anonymous-looking little town will, for the coming couple of days, be the centre of the relatively narrow field of contemporary chamber music?’.

I've known Claude Vivier's marvellous chamber opera Kopernikus for more than ten years, have seen several productions, have studied the music in detail, have written about it. But what, sacré nom de Dieu, is it actually about? There is something elusive, ungraspable, about this féerie mystique, as Vivier called it (a mystical enchantment). Ostensibly, Kopernikus tells of a woman's journey to the next world. But there is no real narrative as such, and a great many detours and off-ramps, such that an audience could be forgiven for not grasping this central fact. What the work is not about – appearances to the contrary – is the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who barely features in the opera, only appearing at the end to open the gates of heaven. Vivier explained that it was the mythic Copernicus that interested him, ‘the idea of the cosmic searcher’, and that he had made no attempt to research the life and thought of the real Nicolaus Copernicus. The principal character is Agni, the Hindu deity – a male god, but represented here in female form by an alto. Vivier made it clear that he identified strongly with the central character, so much so that we may regard Agni as one of the long list of ‘Vivier characters’ in his work. In a press release at the time of the work's premiere he noted: ‘Agni is the Hindu god of fire ... Fire is my astrological sign. I was born on April 14. I am Aries, the ram. Agni, c'est moi’.