For me personally, Béla Bartók is the greatest composer of the first half of this century. I think that none of his contemporaries has so creatively enriched the three basic elements of music: harmony, melody, and rhythm, all three in balance, without neglect of any. And his range of expression extends all the way from gentle lyricism to violent, atavistic outbursts.

Approaching His Eightieth Birthday, Elliott Carter has acquired a new fluency, as if composing had suddenly—finally—become easy. In his middle years Carter felt compelled to exhaust a musical vocabulary with each composition. Since the solo piano Night Fantasies of 1980, however, he has based a series of widely different works on similar premises: after years of ploughing through rocky soil it was now time for the harvest. As an overflow of this bounty Carter has produced a new (for him) genre: short occasional pieces of three to six minutes in duration. Along with the five major works composed since Night Fantasies, there are seven new short works for media ranging from solo violin to large orchestra. The inventiveness and high spirits of his recent music may call to mind those other wonders of a secondyouth, Falstaff and Agon.

It seems clear that, by a certain point in the twentieth century, the roles of composer and performer had become increasingly separated, but when we think of composers such as JS Bach, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, we are reminded that the idea of the musician as composer-performer is not new. Today, we can see an increasing number of musicians running a double life as composer and performer. What does it mean to be a composer-performer in the twenty-first century? How does the relationship of compositions to their performances change when the composer is the performer?

At the Venice Festival this year the first performance was given of Stravinsky's Monumentum pro Gesualdo Venosa ad CD Annum. This consists of three of Gesualdo's five-part madrigals, ‘re-composed for instruments’ by Stravinsky. The madrigals he has chosen are ‘Asciugate i begli occhi’ (Book V, No. 15), ‘Ma tu, cagion di quella’ (Book V, No. 18), and ‘Belta poi che t'assenti’ (Book VI, No. 2). Stravinsky's full orchestra for the work consists of two oboes, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and strings without double basses, but he uses no trumpets or trombones in the first madrigal, and no horns or strings in the second.

Giacinto Scelsi was a master improviser. He created hundreds of hours of music, which he originally recorded on tape and then had transcribed for various instruments. These transcriptions were made in collaboration with various musicians: the majority by Vieru Tosati, but also Alvin Curran, Sergio Caffaro and myself.

Many words have been written on the subject of symmetry in Bartók, prompted by the abundance and variety of examples of the phenomenon to be found on the music's ‘surface’. As yet, however, the fundamental stasis of symmetry and the dynamism for which Bartók's music is noted have not been adequately reconciled, irrespective of what kind of symmetry has been examined – spatial, formal, or pitch-class. One of the problems regarding work in the first of these categories has been that analysts have tended to examine excerpts rather than complete spans of music. Thus while Jonathan Bernard proposes that there is in Bartók a ‘hierarchy of relationships in which smaller symmetries contribute to larger ones, which in turn contribute to even larger ones, and so on, across ever larger spans of time’ – a theory which has the potential, at least, to account for dynamic aspects of the music – his concern only with incomplete spans limits the effectiveness of his approach.

A Michael Finnissy work is like a journey from one point to another, along which there are any number of digressions off the ‘main path’, some of them extended. By the end of this journey, one realizes that the digressions were far more interesting than the conclusion: indeed the journey primarily served the purpose of enticingone into the space in question. As a ‘guide’ through the near 200 works that occupy Michael Finnissy's catalogue in the year of his 50th birthday, I shall take the liberty of constructing ‘paths’ of my own: after all, there are an infinite number of such paths, and though none will lead us through the oeuvre in its entirety, I wish to give some impression of the sheer scope and stimulation of Finnissy6s body of work.

The techniques and aesthetic of Xenakis's music have been widely discussed in books and articles—many by the composer himself. These issues belong to the ‘outside time’ characteristics of music which Xenakis has defined in his article ‘Towards a Metamusic’ (TEMPO 93). So far, however, there has been little or no detailed discussion of the ‘inside time’ aspect of his music, namely the problems relating to its performance, although it is generally known that many of his works—especially those where solo players are involved, such as Nomos Alpha, Mikka, Eonta, Herma, Evryali, Synaphai-Connexites—are exceptionally difficult to play. These problems are important and must be solved not only for the sake of satisfactory performances of Xenakis's music, but also because they raise wider questions concerning the further exploration of instrumental technique.

Sándor Veress, who was born in 1907 at Kolozsvár, a major town of Transylvania (now Cluj, Rumania), studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with Kodály for composition, Bartók for piano, and Lajtha for folksong research. From the age of twenty he was a prolific composer, of marked individuality—already strongly evident in the works of his first period, written in a very distinctive neo-classical contrapuntal idiom with strong national inflexions. By 1939 he had produced an impressive body of works, including two powerful and concentrated string quartets, a series of witty chamber-music sonatinas (1931–33) and the more expansive Violin Sonata No.2 (1939), a Partita for small orchestra (1936), the lyrical and poetic two-movement Violin Concerto (1937–39), a ‘Transylvanian Cantata’ for mixed chorus (1935), anda ballet The Magic Flute(1937).

Cornelius Cardew's 193–page Treatise is the longest and most elaborate piece of Graphic Music ever made. Although it was intended for improvisation and realization, using as many or as few pages as required, and with no fixed rules of interpretation, the piece can be regarded as a graphic construction inspired by music – and with ‘music’, in the broadest sense, as its subject matter. It was influenced by the philosophy of Frege and Wittgenstein, and in particular the latter's exhaustive treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which not only inspired the title but almost certainly the composer's economical approach to this endeavour and the rigorous development of his material. It was composed from 1963 to 67.

Barry Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987, a few hours after the first performance of his new chamber work, ARC. His hectic life-style with its incessant demands had burned him out. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but the real cause was exhaustion from years of overwork as a composer, teacher, concert organizer, ‘ghost’ writer, and pioneer in the dissemination of electro-acoustic music in this country. He was 52 years old and, sadly, just beginning to be recognized as a composer of international stature.

This article investigates the tension between originality and success for ‘emerging composers’ involved in composition opportunities in the British contemporary classical music scene. It utilises survey responses from 47 new music composers to better understand their experiences of these very public signs of compositional success. Though the narrative of the original artist is still significant, conflicts arise between ‘uniqueness’ and the realities of the composition opportunity. Composers aspire to be original, but are aware that a number of other, more instrumental, factors play a crucial role in being chosen. Despite the continuing importance of opportunities to many composers’ development, there are areas that could be made more transparent to ensure they are benefitting an aesthetically diverse range of artists.

We would do the interview in the circle. It was clearing-up time after yet another rehearsal in the Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, and I was following a slow-moving John Cage of 78 years up the stairs as he embarassingly held doors for me and explained the tight schedule he was bound by. He has now visited the U.K. three times in one year, taking in the Huddersfield, Almeida, and Glasgow's Musica Nova festivals, all in the middle of his usual jet-setting around the world which occupies the greater part of his year. With such tight schedules and a time-consuming specialised diet, it is incredible that he grants interviews at all. His usual answer – based, as ever, in his infamous non-intention – is: ‘because people ask me to!’ Non-intentionality has been his basic aesthetic position since at least the 1950s, and as I found out, he's still finding fresh nuances there. At least when he's got the time to sit down at his desk. Why does he do it?

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.

A critique of politically engaged art is that gallery-dwellers, concert-goers and theatre-lovers share the same political inclination as the artists. Often known as ‘preaching to the choir’, the critique holds that art's power to challenge and persuade is rendered valueless when it is experienced only by people who already hold the same (typically leftist) ideas. In this article I suggest three distinct yet interconnected responses to this critique: namely, ‘expanding’, ‘galvanising’ and ‘activating’ the choir. In the first part I explore ‘expanding’ and ‘galvanising’ through works by Stefan Prins, Sarah Nicolls, Pamela Z and Soosan Lolavar. In the second half I discuss how I ‘activate’ the choir in my own work.

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.

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.