The notion of the Darmstadt School lies at the very heart of any conception of what the Darmstadt New Music courses were, how they functioned and what their purpose was. Arguably, the notion is important, too, in understanding what the Darmstadt New Music Courses still are, even now, a half-century on from the original coining of the term itself.

The above quote, extracted from his L'Opere per Flauto (1977–1990), provides not only a colorful introduction to the effusive imagination of Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, but also a preview of what an unfamiliar listener may expect to find in his music. His largely unchanging musical language has slowly yet deliberately – like the four-minute unbroken cello glissando found near the end of his Vanitas for voice, cello and piano (1981)– captured the attention of composers, performers, scholars, and new music enthusiasts for over 30 years. Moreover, examination of Sciarrino's music provokes consideration for fascinating compositional comparisons, particularly in 20th-century Italian music, as his oeuvre demonstrates similarities with, and advancements of, the music of his compatriots. In this article, we will ‘reconnoiter’ the music of Sciarrino on two different levels, by: 1) contextualizing the formulization of his compositional language from developmental and sociological perspectives, and 2) conceptualizing these investigations in All'Aure in Una Lontananza (1977), a work which would perhaps forecast goals of his life output.

In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

In a characteristically bold assertion, the philosopher and composer Roger Scruton once claimed that ‘the lingering backward glance towards that which can never be recovered (and which is falsified in the very yearning for it) has been the greatest vice of English music in our century. Like every form of sentimentality, it involves a “turning away” from the present reality, a desire to lock emotions into a narrow and predetermined world of fantasy, a world which you yourself control’.

EG: In 1960, in your article ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu’ you introduce the word ‘anonymity’ or anonymat. Here is what you say: ‘The great works of Joyce and Mallarmé are the data for a new age in which texts are becoming – as it were – anonyme – y parlant de lui-même et sans voix d'auteur.’ (Here you are quoting Mallarmé's famous letter to Verlaine.) And you go on: ‘If I had to name the motive underlying the work I have been trying to describe [the Third Sonata], it would be the search for an “anonymity” of this kind.’

This search for an ‘anonymity’ of that kind, is it part of your motive for using serial techniques altogether?

The following interview with Pierre Boulez contains arresting statements from the composer, casting new light on his musical and historical thinking. New insights emerge in an elaborate discussion of his compositional techniques in Pli selon pli and other main works. Surprising to some readers, Boulez the modernist here admits his constant dependence on personal choices and musical taste. He gives his views on modernism's intriguing relation to the classical musical tradition. He describes the cultural situation immediately following the Second World War and he discusses the complex relation between ‘life’ and ‘work’. Boulez takes up his experience as a conductor and points to the influence of Wagner, Debussy, and Mahler on his later conception of musical form. He finally airs his opinions on some lighter issues like Parisian culture, early music, rock, and opera.

‘To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with,’ declares John Cage of his contradictory relationship with the older composer. If paradox summarizes this particular discourse between an interested pupil and his predecessor, however, it is both a compositional and musicological discourse exploring the juxtaposition of explicit historicism and aesthetic distance, or ‘disinterest’. The project, or rather the problem, of musical ‘neutrality’ is one that Cage inherited from his idol and subsequently adopted with enthusiasm, as his stubborn pre-occupation with Erik Satie's 1918 symphonic drama, Socrate, evinces. Cage's initial encounter with Satie's work seems quickly to have inspired a commitment to interrogating modernism's engagement with history. Having been introduced to Socrate by Virgil Thomson in a performance that, in Anthony Tommasini's words, ‘profoundly changed Cage, [who] grew to revere Satie’, Cage immediately set out to adapt the score for Merce Cunningham's ballet Idyllic Song in 1947. Denied copyright permission for his two-piano arrangement, Cage resourcefully set out to re-write the musical accompaniment for the ballet (and appease the disobliging publishers) more than two decades later in 1969, retaining Satie's original phrasing in order to preserve Cunningham's choreography and sardonically re-titling the piece Cheap Imitation.

In his introduction to Gertrude Stein's Four In America, Thornton Wilder quotes Stein's answer to someone who had asked for an explanation of her well-known line ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’

Following Milton Babbitt's untimely death at the age of 94 (death at any age is untimely, since it unties the time dimension) in January 2011, I was interested in finding out more about his relationship, personal and music-theoretical, with the US information science community during and after the Eisenhower years. The musical avant-garde represented in parody by Babbitt and Cage as two poles of an antithesis sprang into life in the Cold War era at the same time as Scientology, MAD and Playboy magazine. Today the US doyen of priapism is ready to admit that even the best formula for a creative life has its natural limits. I wanted to ask Joseph Straus and Jerry Kohl what they thought of Babbitt's influence in the wider context of cognitive linguistics. In addition to positioning Babbitt as a significant influence on the Russian composer's serial music in the instructive Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Joseph Straus is co-editor (with Stephen Dembski) of Babbitt's Words about Music. Jerome Kohl is a fellow Stockhausen enthusiast and distinguished former editor of Perspectives of New Music, a periodical set up in the 1960s to assert US authority in new musical theory and practice by an editorial board including Babbitt and graced by a logo in honour of serial music devised by Stravinsky himself.

Karlheinz Stockhausen embraced the potential of electronic music to generate new timbres and acoustic typologies early in his career. After first experimenting with magnetic tape in works such as Gesang der Jünglinge (1955) and Kontakte (1958–60), he later embraced other synthesis technologies for the production of large-scale spatial electro-acoustic works such as Sirius (1970) and Oktophonie (1990–91). His interest in technological advances in sound design and sound diffusion also managed to penetrate his highly evolved Klavierstücke.

This article explores aspects of identity which underlie compositional processes in James MacMillan's music. This is not intended as a critical discourse on identity as such, since this highly contested area is subject to ‘extensive and intensive controversy about how identity should be conceptualised in the wake of various anti-foundational critiques to which it has been subject’. Since in the course of this article I will use the essential concepts of ‘Scottish identity’ and ‘Catholic identity’ in particular as points of reference, it is necessary to show on what basis these terms have been conceived in relation to MacMillan.

EG: Analyzing Pli selon pli, I went to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle and studied your sketches. There were some astonishing findings. As an example, let us look at the vocal line in Improvisation I sur Mallarmé. I wanted to take a restricted material and investigate it, and I wanted to find out how this vocal line was generated. If we look at these music examples: First, here are the pitches of the vocal line, ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hu,’, etc. [Example 1, my notation, EG.]

James MacMillan was 50 years old on 16 July 2009 and his birthday was celebrated by musical institutions not just in Britain, but internationally. As a composer and conductor in residence for the BBC Philharmonic he led performances of his Symphony No.3: Silence and The World's Ransoming. The Royal Northern College of Music staged a three-day celebration of his work while The Sixteen toured his music under conductor Harry Christophers. His recent St John Passion was performed in Berlin and Amsterdam by the London Symphony Orchestra and in Rotterdam concerts of his music were given by the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra and the Hilliard Ensemble. The widespread regard for MacMillan's music evidenced by these performances is the culmination of a steady rise in popularity, undisputedly catalyzed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra première of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. In a 1993 Tempo article on MacMillan, music critic Stephen Johnson describes the premiere thus: ‘there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented’.

EG:Who – except Stéphane Mallarmé – is being portrayed in your principal work Pli selon pli – portrait de Mallarmé? Nobody? The listener? Or Pierre Boulez himself?

PB: I think that it is a double portrait: It is a portrait of Mallarmé and myself. Of course Mallarmé is a poet who has been terribly important to me. The kind of relationship we had, our working together – in spite of the difference in centuries! – brings up somebody else: That is the portrait of a kind of mixture of Mallarmé and me, finally.

Sergei Prokofiev's association with modernism was a curious one: on the one hand, he thought his technically innovative, bold and challenging music positioned him as a modernist but on the other, he remained wary of aligning himself with any specific movement. Such a combination of reluctance and ambiguity in the face of a movement that was engaging interwar Europe with such intensity stems from what can be viewed as an overly protective attitude to his own purity of idiom. Prokofiev was keenly aware of his own prodigious talent and simultaneously anxious of possible musical influence. Nonetheless, he continued to be watchful of cutting-edge developments in music even if he was not particularly sympathetic to the accompanying philosophical debates on modern music.

In January 2009 the third part of a triptych of orchestral compositions by Vic Hoyland was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Each of its constituent compositions relates to a particular city: Vixen to Palermo, Qibti to Alexandria, and Phoenix to Venice. This article seeks a positive heuristics and proposes a reading of Phoenix that contemplates some of the ways in which freeing Hoyland's recent music from old arguments and discourses reveals music that is responsive to contemporary thought, fascinating, virtuosically idiosyncratic, and which presents new challenges to musical design.

The publication of three previously unpublished early organ works of Samuel Barber (1910–1981) in the hundredth year since his birth allows an opportunity to consider his output afresh for an instrument he knew well from his childhood years. Known to millions through the broadcast, concert and film media, Barber's most-played work, the Adagio from the String Quartet, op. 11 (1936) has remained a familiar voice to contemporary ears 75 years after its composition. Indeed it could be fairly suggested that it has become to America what Elgar's Nimrod has to the British; a piece that can summon up the rawest of emotions within its first bars whilst being imbued with an unquestionable national identity.

• London: Proms 2010 Martin Anderson, Rodney Lister, Robert Stein, Paul Conway

• Fifteenth Israeli Music Festival Jehoash Hirshberg

• Bregenz: Mieczysław Weinberg festival ‘In der Fremde’ Martin Anderson

• Liverpool: Shchedrin's Oboe Concerto Helen Thomas

• Glasgow: Sorabji's ‘Sequentia Cyclica’ Alistair Hinton

• London: James MacMillan's Violin Concerto

• Further reports from Presteigne, London and Cyprus Paul Conway, Jill Barlow, Martin Anderson

In April 2010, the Guildhall School of Music recognized German composer Helmut Lachenmann's expertise in extended instrumental techniques, inviting him to give the keynote speech at a research day dedicated to contemporary performance practice; in May, he had a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music conferred upon him for his achievements as a composer; in June, the London Symphony Orchestra performed Lachenmann's Double (Grido II) for string orchestra, in doing so becoming the first non-BBC British orchestra to have performed his music; and in October, the Southbank Centre presented two days of Lachenmann's music including performances by the Arditti String Quartet and a much expanded London Sinfonietta, the latter broadcast on Radio 3. Outside London, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group gave a performance of his most recent work, Got Lost for soprano and piano, and the University of Manchester presented a mini-festival dedicated to his music. This roll call of events might be seen then as the celebration to be expected as a noted composer passes a milestone, but Lachenmann is a composer who – despite his age – could until recently have escaped such attention in Britain. In 1995, Elke Hockings wrote in these pages that, while enjoying ‘an exalted reputation among a small circle of English contemporary music enthusiasts, […] to the wider English music public he [Lachenmann] is little known’ and critical reception has been mixed, often extremely negative. Introducing Lachenmann to an audience at the Southbank Centre in October, Ivan Hewett described him as ‘a composer we don't know well in this country, an omission we are gradually repairing’.

• London, Barbican: James Clarke ‘Untitled No. 2’ Paul Conway

• Baku: Qara Qarayev Festival Alecander Ivashkin

• London, St George's Church: Benjamin Ellen Malcolm Miller

• Buxton Opera House; ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ Tim Mottershead

• London and Durham: James MacMillan Paul Conway

• London, Bridewell Theatre: Robert Hugill Jill Barlow

• Zagreb: International Contemporary Music Festival Donata Premeru

• Further reports from Liverpool and London Paul Conway, Martin Anderson, Malcolm Miller