The music of Jakob Ullmann (b. 1958) is notable for its protracted structural stasis and delicacy; its fusion of rigorously engineered notational systems, abstract graphical elements and Byzantine iconography; and – above all – its unrelenting quietness. This article offers a rare view into Ullmann's compositional practices, with a specific focus upon the role of fragility in the work. Exploring this concept of fragility as a musical feature, this article considers a number of Ullmann's works from the perspectives of the compositions and their scores, the performance and the agency of performers and, finally, how audiences may listen to this fragility. The article concludes with a consideration of the importance of fragility to Ullmann's oeuvre, and of how it might help us to further understand his music.

When Addressing a text to be set a composer will, at the extremes, offer it violence or reverence, and a sharp-edged exchange was committed to print in the 1960's concerning the correct relation between parole and musica when sentence (or stanza) is made cadence. In his Conclusion to Denis Stevens's A History of Song, Michael Tippett stated that one of the attributes of the song-writer was the ability to destroy all the verbal music of the poetry he set and to substitute ‘the music of music’. Five years later, in his contribution to the Festschrift for Tippett's 60th birthday, Peter Pears made a spirited denial of this ‘Mantis-like’ proposition: the composer should court his text, designing a musical structure compliant to his purpose while according the words the care of the poet whose art they first were. Behind this genteel shadow-boxing lay a wider issue: whether there were definable canons for the setting of English text (as exemplified by Benjamin Britten, since it was against his vocal works that the felicities and inflations Pears discerned in Tippett's 1943 cantata Boyhood's End and 1951 song cycle The Heart's Assurance were implicitly being measured) and whether Tippett's practice flouted them.

The overriding picture that emerges from the scrutiny of the sketches for Peter Maxwell Davies's Third Symphony (1984) is the remarkable insight it affords in demonstrating a highly proficient composer in total control of his material. He is the consummate workman: diligent, methodical, economical. Indeed, his rather cerebral approach can be construed as objective – purely in the sense of the detached and calculating nature of the sketches, seemingly free as they are from spontaneous outpourings of instinctive musical inspiration. Nevertheless, Davies's method of composing endows the overall project with a sense of cogent direction and powerful meaning. Such discernment is not easily achieved, and has to be carefully planned early on in the work's genesis; certainly, the Third Symphony – a prodigious piece of architecture lasting almost one hour – is enriched by its preliminary working-out. Furthermore, Davies's employment of precompositional determinants, such as Magic Squares and pitch and durational matrices, is so integral to the overall construction of the piece that there exists a susbstantial volume of material, soley devoted to precompositional workings for the work.

If it is Indeed the case that there is a landscape of the soul which song inhabits, few would dissent from the view that in England in 1900 it was a dead land. The ‘aesthetic tension’ between poetry and music which had stimulated Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf seemed entirely absent, and there was no English Eichendorff or Mörike. Stephen Banfield has asserted that English composers at this time aspired only to produce a ‘frictionless entity’ by providing a ‘pianistic’ accompaniment to Rupert Brooke's or Mathew Arnold's words.

An important factor in understanding the two kinds of presentation is that – seen historically – one or other has at different times moved into the foreground; moreover, that in connexion with the development of music and as a consequence of the continually progressing ‘conquest of the pitch-domain’, a mixing of the two kinds of presentation was arrived at. Here Webern above all follows Adler, who speaks in his book Der Stil in der Musik (1911) of ‘immensely multifarious intermediate and transitional stages from homophonic to polyphonic voice-leading’, of their mixing, of a ‘to and fro rich in variety, … continual exchange of the two basic kinds, homo – and polyphony’ (p. 246). As has already been said, Webern, going beyond this, assumes that the mixing up is caused by a tendency, on the part of the two kinds of presentation, ‘mutually (to) permeate each other more and more’ (Lecture IV).

Anyone bold enough to claim that the British compositional scene is dominated at present by a mainstream whose principal godfathers are Tippett and Birtwistle might just as well extend the reductive flourish by observing that an alternative duo – Britten and Maxwell Davies – not only have less in common with each other but are also less influential, less ‘significant’. Despite obvious differences of style, Tippett and Birtwistle share a basic predisposition to internationalism and modernism. By contrast, Britten's resistance to modernism and Davies's aspiration to classicism combine with a more direct response from both composers to local, if not exactly ‘national’ features, and, by the criteria for mainstream membership given above, this means that they belong on the margins of contemporary musical life in Britain, not at the centre.

(This is the second of two interviews Vera Lukomsky conducted with Sofia Gubaidulina while she was Annual Guest Composer during the festival of her music which took place at San Jose State University School of Music, California in April 1995. The first interview, ‘The Eucharist in my fantasy’, appeared in Tempo 206. In this second interview, recorded at Gubaidulina's hotel on 5 April 1995, she talks more about her technical procedures, especially regarding structural proportion. The interview took place in Russian and is here presented in Vera Lukomsky's English translation.)

‘Dear Stravinsky, you are a great artist. Be with all your strength a great Russian artist. It is so wonderful to be of one's country, to be attached to one's soil like the humblest of peasants! And when the foreigner treads upon it, how bitter all the non-sense about internationalism seems.’

Schoenberg's second opera, Die Glückliche Hand (1910–13), is a work of crucial importance for the understanding of the composer's subsequent development. Not only does it foreshadow the later and incomplete Die Jakobsleiter, but in reaching out into related artistic fields it brings together for the first time in Schoenberg's career a number of threads that were to be of great significance for him both as man and creator.

“If Puccini were alive to-day, he'd be writing for the films.” A friend of mine recently expressed this provocative opinion, one consideration of which propounds the interesting questions of the economic possibility of opera surviving, and of the measure of fulfilment which the composition of film music affords to a composer whose leanings are towards the dramatic. The former question will probably be decided quite automatically. The financial strength of the film industry provides handsome rewards for the professional composer; the opera house does not. Opera was a living art in the countries most affected by the war, and it seems probable that its survival at all in these countries can only be on the basis of the well-tried repertoire. If this be so, the opera-house cannot avoid taking on the artistic value and functions of a museum.

“We know that even in ‘lyrical’ performances in the theatre a conflict exists between the dramatic action, which must move on, and the musical composition, which by its nature holds back. How should we reconcile the conflict between the beauty of a formal medium of expression, music, with the speed which is characteristic of every type of film?”

This article is an interview with the Franco-Slovenian composer, conductor and trombonist Vinko Globokar, translated, edited and introduced by the author. It offers an overview of Globokar's musical development and a consideration of his artistic position, which straddles the worlds of composition and improvisation. Globokar's music combines complex organisation with an interest in non-hierarchical and improvisatory elements. He has always refused to pit the avant-garde claims of contemporary music against those of free jazz, his music embracing aspects of both, as well as of traditional Balkan musics. His genre-defying approach remains better known in continental Europe than in the UK or North America, and the present text is a contribution to the limited bibliography on Globokar in English.

This article considers the ‘representation of decay’ in selected concert works by the Australian composer Cat Hope. It draws on a mixed-method research methodology, comparing the conceptual aspects of Hope's oeuvre with analyses of studio and live recordings of Hope's work and discussing how such ideas of ‘decay’ may play out in the sonic world. Two forms of spectral analysis are employed: firstly the analysis of spectral parameters roughness, noisiness, brightness, pitch, and centroid, and secondly a visualisation of the music as a spectrogram. The data for the spectral analyses are derived from Alexander Harker's spectral descriptor tools for MaxMSP which record a value for each parameter every 25 milliseconds. At times, values are normalised within a range of 0 and 1, as representative of how listeners experience parametrical changes (i.e. dynamics, in relative terms rather than absolutes in relation to other sounds in the work). Importantly, perception of noisiness is more acute at frequencies in which the auditory critical bands are wider, below 250 Hz (roughly below middle C), precisely the upper range specified by Hope to define instruments suitable for the Australian Bass Orchestra.

This article offers generalised reflections on current aesthetic interests and values within the field of new music. Critical composition and postmodernism are considered for the relevance these historic positions might hold today. Then two important trends of the past decade are presented: first, music that draws attention toward the sounding shape and act of listening, reflecting the recent surge of interest in materialism across academic and artistic disciplines; and second, pieces that include aspects such as physical action, lighting and theatrical approaches to expand the possibilities of concert hall work beyond the purely sonic.

Large-scale polyrhythms appear in almost every composition Elliott Carter wrote during the 1980s. The roots of this technique can be found in earlier compositions where Carter deliberately combined different simultaneous speeds not only at the musical surface, but also at a deeper, structural level. In A Mirror on which to dwell (1975), he already uses this compositional tool as a form-generating feature. Through the analysis of three songs from this cycle (Anaphora, Insomnia and O Breath), it is shown how the appearance of structural polyrhythms at the musical surface is meticulously organized through pitch organization, instrumentation and the relation with text. The double function of the polyrhythm – as a surface phenomenon and a background structure – is essential for the understanding of this composition. It also shows the difference with Carter's later use of the same technique in the 1980s, where large-scale or structural polyrhythms are more of a constructional nature and remain invisible in the musical score.

Art (and especially music) has a fundamental catalytic function, which is to effect sublimation by all its means of expression. It should aim to lead by constant points of reference towards that total exaltation in which, unaware of self, the individual will identify with an immediate, rare, vast and perfect truth. If a work of art achieves this even for an instant, it has fulfilled its purpose. This massive truth does not consist in objects, nor feelings, nor sensations; it lies beyond them, as Beethoven's Seventh lies beyond music. For this reason, art is capable of leading to those regions still occupied by certain religions.

Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet, ‘before the universe was born’, is a shining example of his radical compositional approach. With an intense interest in creating a rich, numinous sound-world constructed firmly on principles of nature, science and ancient philosophy, Radulescu developed a unique compositional language that breaks with traditional musical conventions. In hopes of illuminating the inner workings behind his often enigmatic compositional process, this article examines various aspects relating to Radulescu's Fifth Quartet: the work's formal construction, with a focus on its notation and overall large-scale harmonic development; the Quartet's rhythmic devices and their link to the philosophical underpinnings that drive the work; the extended instrumental string techniques employed throughout, the sounds they achieve, and how they are executed; and the work's spectral pitch organisation.

Vienna's credentials as a cradle of modernism are too familiar to need rehearsing. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka conjure up a world at once iridescent and lowering, voluptuously self-indulgent and coolly analytical. Arnold Schoenberg has been accorded pride of place as Vienna's quintessential musical modernist who confronted the crisis of language and meaning by emancipating dissonance and, a decade later, installing a new serial order. It is a tidy narrative and one largely established in the years after the Second World War by a generation of students and disciples intent upon reasserting disrupted continuities. That such continuities never existed is beside the point; it was a useful and, for its time, productive revision of history because it was fuelled by the excitement of discovery.

Gerhard was not only the first important British composer to adopt electronic music techniques; it seems probable that he was, by a few months, the creator of the first British score to involve tape. From 1954 to 1959 his electronic music consisted of nearly a dozen works of incidental music for theatre, radio, and film, initially to provide special effects as an extension of the possibilities of a chamber ensemble—such as piano sounds played backwards (e.g. in the radio play A Leak in the Universe, 1955). By 1958 he had assembled sufficient equipment to make up a very small studio, apparently little more than a couple of tape recorders, at his home in Cambridge. It remained very small until his death in 1970.