A re-evaluation of the work and status of a composer not infrequently occurs a decade after death and/or during an anniversary year. Howard Ferguson was born on 21 October 1908. The centennial year of his birth saw a number of high-profile concerts and talks devoted to his music and public life. My aim is not to survey the career and work of a musician who contributed significantly to many mainstream activities and events in 20th-century British musical life, including the war-time National Gallery concerts, the Vaughan Williams-Finzi composer circle, chamber music performance, the Royal Academy of Music, OUP and Associated Board interpretative editions.

After the early evening launch party for the first edition of my Works of Stockhausen in 1976, a few of us went straight from the publisher's London office in Conduit Street to a Rolling Stones concert at Earl's Court, the centrepiece of which was a giant mockup of the band's iconic Mick Jagger lips with a poking tongue that actually moved. The same message of impish disobedience is reflected in Lucifer's Dance, Stockhausen's rather more challenging image of a wind band as a grimacing face, on the one hand the taunting clown face of a circus hall of mirrors, on the other a tribute to the machinelike discipline, svelte orchestration, and curious up-and-down, side-to-side gymnastics of American jazz of the big band era of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller.

As I start to write this I pick up my copy of the Pelican European Music in the Twentieth Century, edited by Howard Hartog (1962, but the original Routledge edition was 1957). It falls open – for the spine is hopelessly cracked from more than 40 years of constant use, and the pages are coming adrift – at page 257, and a familiar voice arises, discoursing on the most famous piece by Ravel.

On 5 December 5 1941, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Virgil Thomson wrote to Gertrude Stein, his friend and the cocreator of their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The bulk of the letter concerned Thomson's most recent plan for publication of the opera, including details of dividing the royalties and expenses involved in the undertaking (a continual source of disagreement and haggling between them). At the end of the letter, referring to Stein's assurance at the end of her most recent letter to him that the European war would be over soon and that they would soon meet again in Paris, Thomson wrote, ‘… I miss you a great deal but do hope that you are right that we shall be seeing each other soon in Paris. I wouldn't know; I have no prophetic sense about wars … When the war is over we must write another opera. Only we must wait till then, because I don't think we could choose the subject very well by mail'. His next preserved letter to her was almost five years later. In that letter, dated 5 March 1946, Thomson wrote, ‘Carl [Van Vechten] says the opera is nearly finished. I hope so. I want to see it. I pine for it’.

Musical activity is one of the many forms of purposeful human activity. Its peculiarity lies in its creative character – an attribution which brings to mind the concept elaborated by Mooney (1963), in which the quality of creativeness was evoked in relation to the product (or artistic work), the process of its production and its author. One aspect of Mooney's reflections that are of importance to the present discussion is his observation that a considerable influence on creative activity is exercised by the favourable or detrimental conditions under which it arises (atmosphere, social environment, historical context).

One of the more telling indicators of Luigi Russolo's (1885–1947) Anglo-American reception is his description in Grove as an ‘Italian inventor, painter and composer’. Within this lurks the devaluation of his composing efforts in comparison to his work as the maker of intonarumori (noise instruments), his authoring of new aesthetic ideas, and his activities as a painter. There is little, perhaps, to argue with in this assessment, for (somewhat ironically) Russolo's music of the future has been consigned irrevocably to the music of the past; Raymond Fearn has suggested that ‘the musical remnants from this period have remained to a large extent in the realm of musical archaeology’. The only material traces available for musical archaeologists are the opening seven bars of the score of Il risveglio di una città (The Awakening of the City; 1913–14): the machines that were to play it were destroyed during the Second World War. The loss of Russolo's compositions has inevitably distorted our understanding of his work and has served to throw attention onto those progressive, and sometimes speculative, theoretical and mechanical aspects of it that have survived in written accounts, at the expense of those elements that are of a more traditional or pragmatic nature. Study of the remaining fragments of Il risveglio di una città, leavened with necessary doses of circumspection and speculation, forms a vital and hitherto under-utilized component to any assessment of Russolo's career.

The 1950s was a particularly important decade for Peter Maxwell Davies. It was the period when he established the fundamental elements of his compositional technique; the decade in which he composed his first acknowledged works; and a time, coinciding with his emergence as a composer of substance, when he travelled to Darmstadt, Paris and Rome. It was also the period that witnessed the publication of two of his own articles, and the decade in which his interest in early music – particularly plainchant – and Indian classical music began to influence his own compositional thinking and resulting works.

It has often been said that David Drew first made his critical reputation with a series of three articles on the music of Olivier Messiaen – essentially, the first informed criticism of the French composer that had appeared in English – published in The Score and I. M. A. magazine in 1955. David's friendship with William Glock, who owned and edited The Score, was long-lasting: from this time, when he was essentially Glock's assistant in its editing and production, to after Glock's death in 2000, when he acted as co-executor of his Will. ‘A Suggested Placing’ is the concluding portion of the final Messiaen article, published in The Score Number 14, the issue of December 1955. The invocations of Charles Ives – at that period hardly known to his own countrymen in the USA, let alone outside it – seem particularly prescient, and should remind us that David had already published a knowledgeable survey of ‘American Chamber Music’(in Chamber Music, ed. Alec Robinson, Pelican Books, 1955).

Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943), the eminent Russian-American music theorist, teacher and composer, emigrated to the United States in 1928, after having served in high positions in some of the major music institutions in the Ukraine, Khar'kov, Moscow, and Leningrad. He settled in New York, where he taught music, mathematics, art history, and his theory of rhythmic design at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and the Teachers College of Columbia University. He formulated a philosophical and practical system of music theory based on mathematics, and became a celebrated teacher of prominent composers and radio musicians. Schillinger's writings include: Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony (New York: M. Witmark, 1940; New York: Charles Colin, 1976); Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 2 vols. (New York: Carl Fischer, 1946; New York: Da Capo Press, 1977); Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976); Encyclopedia of Rhythms (New York: Charles Colin, 1966; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).

In 1953 or thereabouts a London concert was announced containing the British première of Pierrot Lunaire, an epoch-making work as appeared to be the case from every book on music history I had been able to lay my hands on. So I got the score from the Pendlebury Library in the Cambridge Music School and duly became fascinated and perplexed. I then had a visit from David Drew, an undergraduate one year ahead of me. He had also wanted to see the score and had asked Charles Cudworth, the Pendelbury Librarian, how he could get in touch with the person who had taken it out. This was how I got to know David.

When Messiaen finished Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943–4), almost all the orchestral works he had composed up to that point had been religious in ethos.1 There was no real sign that this would change: that he would stop devoting his orchestral works to the service of the Catholic faith. That some 20 years elapsed before he attempted another orchestral sacred work is intriguing. It was Couleurs de la cité céleste (1963) that broke the ice, and after it the orchestral and the sacred became once again closely united, as they had been in the pre-Turangalîla era. Couleurs also brought us his first obvious use of plainchant in an orchestral work, thus heightening the religiosity of this score to approximate that enshrined in Trois petites liturgies. And as Messiaen's fame continued to grow, the religious elements in his music grew with it, both in ubiquity and intensity. Retrospectively, sacred orchestral works composed after Couleurs exceed those before Trois petites liturgies not only in number, but also in magnitude, profundity and grandeur.

From the moment Schoenberg saw the need to use the designations Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, the issue of differentiating material in complex post-tonal scores has been significant. It has formal and textural connotations, and it relates directly to the experience of listening to this music.

This article appeared in the July 1963 issue of Musical Times, whose regular choral music supplement of that month was Christopher Shaw's anthem for chorus and organ A Lesson from Ecclesiastes. It was the first writing of substance to appear about this composer, and very nearly the last to date.

Q: What is ‘Orango’?

A:Orango is an unfinished satirical opera, sketched in 1932 when Shostakovich was in the middle of writing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

In the first composition class I ever took, the professor began by asking us why we wanted to compose. This was a question I had been wrestling with for some time; I had just switched programs at my university and had needed to justify, to myself at least, why I should have taken the biggest risk of my academic career thus far. The question, put so baldly by this professor, had never actually been asked by anyone else when I announced that I wanted to change my course; secretly, I was glad of this, for I felt the answer was too personal and private and new to me to survive any kind of display, or attack.

The Swiss author Gottfried Keller was 27 when he published his first volume of poems in 1846. His early poetry was partly influenced by the German battle for liberalism and the experience of those émigrés who, like Wagner, found their way to Switzerland. The main literary impulses came from Goethe and the German Romantics, impulses finding expression in subjective, even mystical verses. At the same time Keller never lost touch with the here-and-now: a feature that would earn him the description of a poetic realist.

• Birmingham: Howard Skempton Calum MacDonald

• Sydney: Brett Dean's ‘Bliss’ Michael Hooper

• Manchester: the Mahler commissions Tim Mottershead

• Manchester: Anthony Gilbert Paul Conway

• Liverpool: Ensemble 10/10 Helen Thomas

• Stockholm 2007-9: Marie Samuelsson Guy Rickards

• London: John Adams premières Robert Stein

• Further reports from London, Chichester, San Francisco and Belgrade Malcolm Miller, John Wheatley, Jeff Dunn, Donata Premeru

From the time I met David, at least 40 years ago, in Florence, he impressed me with his wide knowledge and liking of contemporary music. This and other matters were spoken of with fascination, rapid changes of thought and feeling. I shall miss him a great deal.

The Anglo-Indian composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892–1988) is best known for his virtuosic, highly decorative and complex style of piano music and vast post-Romantic scale, as typified by his magnum opus, Opus Clavicembalisticum. In his last creative period (post-1973), however, he composed a number of more concise works which depart from the idiom of the piano. This article examines two of these works, Il tessuto d'arabeschi (1979) for flute and string quartet, and Fantasiettina Atematica (1981) for wind trio. It looks primarily at the place of these two works in Sorabji's oeuvre as a whole, but also the wider issues of Sorabji's compositional approach and musical attitudes in later life.

• London, BBC Proms 2009 Rodney Lister, Robert Stein, Paul Conway, Martin Anderson, Malcolm Miller

• Manchester International Festival II Tim Mottershead

• London, ENO: ‘Le Grand Macabre’ Bernard Hughes

• Presteigne Festival 2009 Paul Conway

• Arundel: Montague's ‘Dark Sun’ John Wheatley

• St Albans Cathedral: Casken's ‘Sacrificium’ Jill Barlow

• Viitasaari: Musiikin Aika Calum MacDonald

• Further reports from Manchester and London Tim Mottershead, Jill Barlow