This year's Transit festival (the sixteenth) marked an important milestone, as Maarten Beirens took over as Artistic Director from Mark Delaere, who has steered it through the last 15 years. Delaere very much devised the festival's format, with its hard-edged programming and quirky informality, which one feared might be lost, but any worries about drastic changes under the new regime were soon allayed. Indeed, Beirens is to be congratulated on pulling off one of the most successful festivals I can remember, with an almost unbroken series of strong, inventive works and performances.

When greeted by a deconstructed, open set of brutal bleakness (designed by Jamie Vartan), haunted by the waste of the night before – a pink high-heeled shoe, empty coat hangers and discarded plastic cups – one is made immediately aware of the potency of Enda Walsh's theatrical aesthetic. There is a lone orange balloon offering a tragic echo of a party. Underscored with silence, The Hotel Servant (played by Walsh's long-term collaborator Mikel Murfi) enters and cleans the blood from the stained hotel room floor, and does so with a charisma equal to that of Michael Gambon in the opening scene of Krapp's Last Tape.

From 10 to 20 March 2016, Geneva was transformed into a giant musical playground of sorts: the title of this year's Archipel Festival was ‘Aires de jeux’. Over its 24 editions, the festival has been a showcase for musical creation and has promoted not contemporary music in a broad sense, but rather the music of our time. In a recent interview, the current festival director, Marc Texier, noted that a common misunderstanding is to ‘consider contemporary music as beginning in the post-war period, 70 years ago. That's quite extraordinary! The music of 1945 doesn't have much in common with what is created today. For today's composers, works from 1945 belong to their grandparents or great-grandparent's generations’.

As the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence of the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Philip Venables has – some might say bravely – chosen to adapt 4.48 Psychosis, the last play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane. Brave for several reasons. Kane's work is renowned for its naked, sometimes brutal, expression and themes, and the nihilism and violence of her plays have caused critical uproar in the past. Moreover, her estate has until now been understandably protective of her legacy; Venables's opera, premiered in May, is the first adaptation they have permitted, and came with instructions to remain as true as possible to the text.

An atmosphere of sadness, anger and uncertainty dominated this year's Donaueschinger Musiktage. The passing in November 2014 of Armin Köhler, the artistic driving force behind the festival for the last 23 years, has left a hole that will be hard to fill. Meanwhile, due to state budget cuts Donaueschingen's orchestra-in-residence, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Freiburg und Baden-Baden, paid what will almost certainly be their final visit. Musically, however, it was business as usual, with the programme featuring a wide variety of world premieres, several of works that will certainly be heard many times again, alongside much experimentation of varying interest and executional success.

It wouldn't be the worst idea if Anthony Braxton's Composition No. 58 were used to kick off every music festival. In any event, it's hard to think of a fanfare more fitting for the common fan, whether of classical, jazz or experimental rock. It could, for example, quite easily be followed by a piece of Mauricio Kagel's instrumental theatre or a parade by the Sun Ra Arkestra or the precisely played experimental excursions of the Brooklyn avant-rock outfit Zs.

Only the Sound Remains consists of two stories of supernatural encounters. A monk, praying for the soul of a deceased general, meets the latter's ghost, attracted by the sounds of the lute used in the monk's ritual. A fisherman finds the feather mantle belonging to a Tennin, an angelic spirit, who pleads with him to return the item, which he only does after she performs a celestial dance; thus, the chorus tells us, ‘was the dance of pleasure, Suruga dancing, brought to the sacred east’. Both encounters are evanescent: the ghost of the general is visited by memories of terrible battles and disappears back into the spirit world; the Tennin's dance is an announcement of spring, as the Tennin herself disperses into the mists that obscure mount Fuji. In both stories, the spiritual is a manifestation of something virtual, relating artistic forms to worlds not of, yet touching on, the everyday. The sounds of the lute, which used to belong to the general, are a conduit to deep memory; the dance taught by the Tennin connects humans to the inhuman workings of nature.

The ‘Soundscapes’ exhibition comprised six paintings displayed individually in darkened rooms, each ‘accompanied’ by a specially composed piece played over loudspeakers. The seven artists (two working as a duo) invited to create musical responses represented a cross-section of disciplines, from wildlife recording, sound installation, film composition, DJing and instrumental composition, and, it must be said, all had some crowd-pulling potential. Given the reviews, one might have expected to discover unspeakable things happening in the depths of the National Gallery; however, I found it to be an interesting and well-executed exhibition which presented some thoughtful sonic responses to great paintings.

Each September, contemporary music enthusiasts, composers, scholars and performers from around Australia migrate toward the Victorian regional city of Bendigo for BIFEM, a remarkable music festival now in its third year. The festival has established itself as an annual event of unparalleled significance in Australia – not only as a forum for the presentation of exciting and little-heard music, but as a gathering of like-minded peers. A high proportion of the audience consists of musicians and composers, so informal conversations between concerts are almost as stimulating as the programmed forums and workshops that take place during the festival. In 2015, over the weekend 4–6 September, almost every work in the programme was an Australian premiere, which gives some further evidence of the importance of the festival to the nation's cultural ecology.

Halfway through Stefan Prins's Mirror Box Extensions (2015) a guy next to me stretches out his arms to hold up an iPad. I've noticed his fiddling with the gadget throughout the performance, lacking the courage to tell him just how distracting it is. As other iPads emerge in the crowd, all of them making noises and projecting tiny details from the stage, I realize I've been tricked. I never figured he was simply following Prins's instructions and was actually participating in this work that focuses on blurring the borders between the virtual and the real.

The winter solstice has long held deep significance for cultures dating back to as far as the Neolithic period. Some of civilisation's oldest monuments, from Stonehenge to Newgrange, are carefully aligned on sight lines pointing toward the winter solstice sunrise and sunset. And it's no surprise for the day marked the middle of winter, giving early man a crucial indicator – a signpost that guided food consumption for the remaining winter months – but on an even deeper level, the winter solstice signified for ancient pagan peoples the beginning of a rebirth, marking the resurrection of a beloved sun god and the gradual reawakening of nature.

Nordic Music Days claims to be the longest-running annual music festival in the world, having existed as a showcase for contemporary Nordic composers more-or-less continuously since 1888. This longevity raises some questions of category definition: What might unite today's composers working in Helsinki with their counterparts 1,500 miles away in Reykjavík? Has modern communications technology and international study wiped out national characteristics or amplified them? Does anyone working in this year's host city, Copenhagen, ever make the 30-minute journey over the bridge to check out what's going on in Malmö? What, if anything, does being a ‘Nordic composer’ mean?

In the closing sentence of an essay titled ‘Music and New Music’, from 1960, Theodor Adorno claimed, with his characteristic lack of equivocation, that the difference between new music and music in general was akin to the difference between good music and bad music. His rather sweeping claim was mitigated somewhat by his definition of ‘new music’, which was highly restricted in terms of its technical and moral imperatives. With respect to technique and style, ‘new music’ for Adorno meant almost exclusively the freely atonal music of Schoenberg and his students. Morally speaking, ‘new music’ was defined as that which embodied a critical resistance to the existing order and preserved the freedom of subjective expression as demanded by a Hegelian view of history.

The sheer diversity of Ultima events goes a great way towards explaining Oslo's creative impetus and influence within Northern Europe: the sense of play is tangible in deft, brave and astute programming. With the extension of Lars Petter Hagen's Ultima Festival directorship, taking a risk is still promoted, and very necessary in cultivating the talent and ideas we now expect from and associate with the music scene of Oslo. Ultima 2015, which I attended from 12 to 16 September, did not fail to deliver, provoking and poking at every twist and turn.

The ninetieth birthday of the last surviving founding father of post-WWII classical music is certainly reason enough for celebration, but what could the Lucerne Festival offer that has not already been covered by the many festivities that have taken place around the world? Fortunately, the festival has a trump card up its sleeve: the Lucerne Festival Academy, founded 11 years ago by Pierre Boulez and festival director Michael Haefliger to provide young musicians with the opportunity for intensive study of the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra and Ensemble were omnipresent during 11 concerts given over nine hours on 23 August 2015, performing eight world premieres from three generations of composers inspired by Boulez, alongside eight works from the master himself.