A performer of Luigi Nono's late works is often faced with crucial questions regarding interpretation and technical details. An important tradition has evolved in performing these works, nevertheless it is not always easy to find the necessary information to play them adequately. This article attempts to answer some of the technical and interpretational questions in the context of Das atmende Klarsein and A Pierre – Dell'Azzurro silenzio, inquietum. Our hope is that it will contribute to the discussion about authenticity and freedom of interpretation and provide flutists with practical information not found in the scores.

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.

Invited in 2011 by Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas to contribute to a proposed symposium on the spiritual in late twentieth-century music, I accepted, not because I agreed with the project and its aims, but to defend Stockhausen's character and reputation from convenient misrepresentation. Sin and virtue, spirituality and the spiritual life ask to be addressed in terms of actual works and personal witness – in my own case, not least given the composer's complaint late in life: ‘You have to watch out for Maconie's nihilism’. The test of spirituality inevitably entails scrutinizing the motives of former Stockhausen disciples who changed their minds, among them two English composers of my own generation, Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener, who have since passed away. In 2014 the opening sentence of the present paper provided theologian and Stockhausen-forum editor Thomas Ulrich with an amusing starting-point (‘Suffering? How very Protestant!’) for just the second of a trickle of online discussions of largely pathetic inconsequence.

Compared to the central figures of French spectral music, Horaţiu Rădulescu has received relatively little critical attention. Contrasting temperaments, writing styles and surface musical features have led to a tendency to place Rădulescu in opposition to Grisey in particular. In this article I analyse some of Rădulescu's theoretical writing and demonstrate important shared values with the spectral ‘mainstream’. I then examine Das Andere for solo viola, Op. 49 (1983) in detail and compare it to Grisey's solo viola masterpiece, Prologue (1976). In so doing I hope not only to reveal the inner workings of one of Rădulescu's most compelling and approachable pieces, but also to show some common strategies with Grisey, regardless of their radically different aural results.

This edited transcript of a conversation with composer Monty Adkins explores a wide range of topics: the fundamental aspects of Adkins’ compositional aesthetic, the history and development of his practice, musical influences, considerations of beauty, narrative vs. abstract approaches to composition, types of listening, perceptions of time, notions of the sacred, the imposition (and benefits) of compositional restrictions, the organisation/structuring of non-teleological music, combining electronics with live instruments, and Adkins’ relationship with the listener. The conversation took place on 24 February 2017 at the University of Huddersfield, during the annual Electric Spring festival. Audio of the complete, three-hour conversation can be downloaded and streamed at http://5against4.com/2017/04/18/the-dialogues-monty-adkins/.

The composer Allison Cameron (b. 1963) lives in Toronto. Her music has been widely performed at festivals such as Emerging Voices in San Diego, Evenings of New Music in Bratislava, Festival SuperMicMac in Montréal, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, New Music across America, Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, New York, and Rumori Dagen in Amsterdam. A dedicated performer of experimental music in Toronto, Allison co-founded the Drystone Orchestra (1989) and the Arcana Ensemble (1992). She has been improvising since 2000 on banjo, ukulele, cassette tapes, radios, miscellaneous objects, mini amplifiers, crackle boxes, toys and keyboards, in collaboration with Éric Chenaux, the Draperies, Ryan Driver, Dan Friedman, Mike Gennaro, Kurt Newman, John Oswald, Stephen Parkinson and Mauro Savo, among other musicians. In that same year she became Artistic Director of Toronto's experimental ensemble Arraymusic, a position she held for five years. In 2007, she founded the Allison Cameron Band with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, and in 2009, the trio c_RL with Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet) and Germaine Liu (drums). Allison has experimented with graphic and notational scores that will soon be gathered and published as a collection. Additionally, she is the winner of the 2018 KM Hunter Award for music in Ontario.

Howard Skempton's distinctive presence on the British musical scene, and his prolific compositional output since the mid-1960s, have presented commentators with certain challenges as they contemplate which labels to apply, and, for music analysts, which techniques to deploy. Skempton's own comments, in various interviews and essays down the years, remain the ideal starting point, suggest a range of contexts, some of which underpin this study. With reference to a few of his smaller vocal and keyboard compositions, the quality of constantly shifting rather than strictly fixed elements is explored. When pitch materials conform more or less exactly to tonal or modal tradition, rhythm is particularly important as a determinant of subtle shifting. But it is often the case that pitches identities themselves shift between functions best defined as tonal scale degrees at one extreme and post-tonal pitch classes at the other. The result is a very personal and unaggressive kind of modernism.

Music that features the interface of notation and improvisation tends to dwell in liminal regions of musical labour. It thus calls much entrenched musical vocabulary into question. The word score is one such example. What seems like a synonym for notation in everyday parlance turns out to be something quite different on closer inspection – more regulatory, yet at the same time more inclusive. This article explores three different meanings of the word score through the lens of composer-improviser Bob Ostertag's 1990s tetralogy Say No More: a cut, an index of a game, and a record kept. Say No More consists of a chain of tape pieces and ensemble pieces in which performers Joey Baron, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway and Phil Minton were put in front of a machine-made mirror of themselves … with wacky lenses that distorted the image into something superhuman. In the performances the musicians tried to keep up with their digital reflection, a task at which they could only fail. Although the notation seems to play a minor role in this dynamic, its usage in the score as a whole offers important lessons on what writing might still have to offer composers in the digital era.

In this article I argue that it seems to be an inherent quality of the opera medium that it maintain an active and creative approach to all aspects of stage art and that these can and should be part of the composition since their relation to music is no less obvious than that of text to music. I examine the equivalence of speech and song, the equivalence of opera and theatre in general, the relative status of text and other aspects of the form, the relative status of formal development and melody, the equivalence of stage character and form, and the abstract nature of the concept of plot.

Sir James MacMillan's Symphony No. 4 is claimed by the composer as an abstract work, but a clear programme is discernible through the use of references to the Roman Catholic Mass. MacMillan uses Gregorian chant, quotations from Robert Carver's Missa Dum sacrum mysterium (c. 1523) and his own St Luke Passion (2015) to create a liturgical form for the symphony. These allusions and their presentation in the symphony can be fruitfully understood in relation to Catholic theologies of time and the Eucharist. When allusions to sonata form are also taken into consideration, the result is a complex interaction between different experiences of time in the symphony's span.

Composer Pascal Dusapin has crafted an intriguing and idiosyncratic musical style that is both expressive and rigorously formal. Born in 1955 in Nancy, France, he studied piano and organ in his youth and later Plastic Arts and Sciences, Arts, and Aesthetic at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, notably under composer Iannis Xenakis. From 1981 to 1983, he held a resident scholarship from the Villa Medici in Rome. Among the numerous accolades Dusapin has received are the Cino del Duca Prize in 2005 and the Dan David Prize in 2007. The Collège de France conferred upon him a professorship to hold the Chair of Artistic Creation from 2006 to 2007. He is a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. His body of work includes extensive explorations of solo, chamber, orchestral, and operatic forces. What follows is an edited translation of an interview I made with Dusapin in his studio in Paris on 9 July 2016.