Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) is among the most notable composers in the second half of the 20th century. Over the past 20 years his work has won wide acceptance and greater international attention. His music, performed by world-class musicians in countless countries and in the most prestigious concert halls, has become an integral part of Russian cultural heritage. Schnittke's vast popularity is evident in the existence of so many publications, reviews, and dissertations not only in Russia but all over the world. However, some aspects of the composer's life and music remain unexplored, and a study of Schnittke's work would not be complete without examining one particular subject which influenced Schnittke throughout his creative life: the Faust Legend. The Faustian Legend ‘was among the forces that supported Schnittke's dialogue with the past and shaped his identity’. Before delving into this topic it would be logical to give a brief excursus in the history of the Faustian legend itself.

Of all recent art music styles, few have relied upon technological developments for their composition, performance and recording to the same degree as minimalism. In both the output of the principal composers of the more recent minimalist canon (namely in the objet trouvé works of Reich and Adams, the film scores by Glass and Nyman as well as through the reliance on electronic amplification common to them all) and in the counter-cultural movements characterized by music whose content is absolutely dependent on electronic media, repetitive styles have been transformed. The sophistication of these procedures has naturally resulted in a diminished sense of human labour within the compositional process and, at times, the total loss of a composer's authorial voice. The tintinnabuli music of Arvo Pärt stands out against the general tendency of such repetitive-based composers to harness the latest technology, to the extent that some commentators have baulked at the term ‘minimalist’ as an appropriate category. Robert Schwarz, for example, believes ‘neo-medievalist’ to capture something of Pärt's particular adoption of a supposedly pre-modern, non-technological attitude, while Josiah Fisk opts for the ‘new simplicity’ to describe (negatively) Pärt's monochromaticsm.

Back in the early 1960s, followers of new music in Britain soon became aware that the future would not be entirely dictated by the innovative radicalism of Princeton or Darmstadt – or even by such iconoclastic Brits as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. And anyone inclined to dismiss Nicholas Maw's Scenes and Arias, on its first version's Proms première in August 1962, as a nostalgic pseudo-Delian wallow, was put right by Anthony Payne's enthusiastic contextualization of Maw in this journal a couple of years later. In Payne's analysis, Scenes and Arias triumphantly avoided rambling romanticism, demonstrating a ‘post-expressionist language’ at ‘a new pitch of intensity’, as well as ‘the composer's exceptional feeling for the movement inherent in atonal harmony’.

In 1989, I bought a CD in Paris of the early piano music of André Jolivet. Like many non-French musicians, I had read the name of Jolivet but heard little of his music. Jolivet's reputation as Varèse's leading pupil and the extreme avant-gardist of the pre-World War II group La Jeune France seemed completely at odds with his conventional post-War music occasionally broadcast on Radio 3, such as the Concertos for Trumpet, Piano or Ondes Martenot–music which suggested not fully assimilated influences of Honegger or Hindemith, with little obviously adventurous about it in its rhythmically conservative phrasing and standard formal shapes.

Since November 2004 Simon Emmerson has been Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, following 28 years as Director of the Electroacoustic Music studios at City University, London. As a composer he works mostly with live electronics; he has also completed purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB (Bourges) and the GRM (Paris). In addition to extensive writings on the subject, he was founder Secretary of EMAS (The Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain) in 1979, and served on the Board of Sonic Arts Network from its inception until 2004. He is a Trustee of its successor organisation ‘Sound and Music’. This interview took place in July 2008.

This conversation with Mauricio Kagel took place on 16 April 2008 in the studio of Kagel's house in Cologne. Just by looking at the shelves one could learn a lot, seeing how Kagel organized his scores. Each box included everything related to a single work (or group of works), including the ‘Ur-Manuskript’ (primordial manuscript), as he called it, as well as the working copy with the corrections that arose during rehearsals and the contract with the publishing house. The studio enclosed an unsophisticated upright piano, a huge desk and a corner to receive visits like mine.

It is only in the twelve years since his death that the importance of Niccolò Castiglioni's music has begun to be properly appreciated. A growing list of recordings and scholarly writings has contributed to a reassessment of his importance and Alessandro Solbiati's view of Castiglioni as ‘one of the greatest Italian composers of the 20th century’ now looks likely to find general acceptance.

Friends, pupils and ex-colleagues of Geoffrey Poole (I write as all three) find it difficult to believe that this year witnesses his sixtieth birthday. In the past 40 years, he has consolidated his aesthetic position and career as a British composer of multifarious interests and distinctive personality. This article is a testament to his compositional integrity, staying power, humanity and humility. It is necessarily provisional, because each new work by Poole is a fresh beginning, expanding further outwards but also going deeper within, contributing to Western art music's capacity for regeneration and self-adaptation.

John Cage’s stated opinion regarding the original version of Cheap Imitation – for solo piano – was that it constituted a breach with what he considered the proper role of the composer to be. Despite the fact that the actual pitch content of Cheap Imitation was derived through consultations with the I Ching, and that the rhythmic and metric structures were appropriated from Satie, Cage reserved for himself a great deal of composerly control dictated only by his personal taste: the particular kind of control which, in 1970, ran counter to what he had been doing and writing about for years. In this sense, Cheap Imitation represents a watershed point in Cage’s career, away from the radical indeterminacy of the 1960s and back toward more traditional ideas of notation and composition, containing a balance between elements that are systematized, appropriated, and randomly generated. The work as a whole does not simply re-embrace determinate notation, though Cage’s composed choices are strikingly reminiscent of similar processes from his much earlier works. As William Brooks notes, ‘Cheap Imitation looks and sounds far more like pieces from the early 1940s than like any of its immediate predecessors.’

Editorial Note: Just after the following interview had been edited for inclusion in the present issue of Tempo, we were saddened to learn of the sudden death of David Johnson at his home in Edinburgh on about 30 March, aged 66. He had been an occasional reviewer of Scottish musical events for Tempo. The projects mentioned in the interview were destined to remain unfulfilled, but his substantial legacy of compositions and scholarship had made a distinct and independent-minded contribution to the Scottish musical scene.

‘Passed by the political censor’ – Commissar Lunacharsky

The new Russian generation of composers in 1920s Russia is widely known as the ‘musical avant-garde’. Maximilian Shteinberg, the professor of the Petrograd-Leningrad Conservatoire, who studied under Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, called his pupils more simply: ‘musical lefties’. The older generation tried to define this new trend that was evolving as the younger generation' explorations in the fields of musical systems, sounds, subjects, etc. Among the radical musical events in 1920s Soviet Russia, the quarter-tone system of temperament takes first place.

Roberto Gerhard described the problem of structure in the following manner:

My favourite simile is the experience of flying. Imagine yourself sitting next to the pilot of a glider aircraft. Your first problem is that of getting airborne. So it is, metaphorically speaking, with musical form. Your second problem is to keep airborne, how to take advantage of every condition that may confront you in the air, currents, countercurrents, air pockets and so forth; how to navigate your craft and set a course. Your third problem, when in sight of your destination, is (naturally) how to come down.

Believe me the hazards of the take off and the landing are conspicuous in musical form too. If you have been watching your pilot all the time, you will have realised how his skill, his reflexes, his compass-readings, his judgement of hazards and chance happenings combine instant by instant and result in choice, in doing this rather than that. In short you have been witnessing an activity which consists of a chain of decisions taken in full course of the operation. That, I submit, applies exactly to musical form. A chain of decisions, subserving an overall design and steering a course of action. Naturally they ought to be the right decisions every time, or things may go wrong. If you have to bale out or crash land the thing is not considered to be quite as successful.

This article is, in many ways, a direct response to the more or less simultaneous publication of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and the release of Hilary Hahn's recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto.

It is generally accepted that many composers of the British musical renaissance were strongly stimulated and influenced by nature, but questions such as how and why this influence actually worked, how it manifests itself in the music, how variously composers perceived and reacted to nature, and how ‘nature’ might be defined in the first place (particularly as expressed in a work of art) seem less clear. Although discussions of nature's influence on art have been attempted for centuries, only recently have commentators begun analyzing the exact function of nature in its various guises in the inspiration, creation and shaping of music. Concepts of nature itself differ widely for both composers and musicologists; while ‘nature’ (as a social, cultural or personal construct) in early 20th-century British music tended to be rural, idealized and rustic, it may more generally be understood as the material world in its entirety. Thus Vaughan Williams's London Symphony is just as valid ‘nature music’ as the Sea and Pastoral Symphonies that came before and after.

My theoretical purpose is to distinguish between musical allusions and musical co-presences. A musical allusion is usually a citation of a melody or phrase from a work by a predecessor. In Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, for example, references to Rossini's William Tell and to Wagner's Ring have tantalized listeners and provoked speculation on what these allusions could mean. In general, Shostakovich's music is notable for containing numerous allusions, often ironic, to previous composers. By contrast, Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues and the Eighth String Quartet show more than mere allusions to Bach: the very methods and forms of the Baroque master are incorporated into the later composer's works, as if Bach were a co-creator with Shostakovich; and those methods and forms are not employed ironically. That is to say, the music of Bach has a special significance for Shostakovich, a presence that goes beyond any topical value.

• Amsterdam: ‘Étude pour Espace’ Calum MacDonald

• Aldeburgh Festival 2009 Arnold Whittall

• London: Brian Elias and Paul Patterson Martin Anderson

• Cheltenham Festival 2009 Paul Conway

• Southwark: Maxwell Davies and Harle Malcolm Miller

• Petworth Festival: Tavener's ‘Towards Silence’ John Wheatley

• Oxford: Danald Swann's ‘Perelandra’ Roderic Dunnett

• London, RCM: Stokowski's Symphony Lewis Foreman

• London: Finnissy's ‘Transgressive Gospel’ Jill Barlow

• Further reports from London and Chichester Michael Graubart, Martin Anderson, John Wheatley, Malcolm Miller

• Short Circuit Robin Maconie

• Cornelius Cardew: a life unfinished Keith Potter

• Kofi Agawu's ‘Music as discourse’ Colin Clarke

• Shostakovich studies Edward Venn

• Sounding Postmodernism Michael Hooper

• Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2008 John Fallas, Paul Conway

• Boston: Elliott Carter Celebrations Rodney Lister

• Leuven: Transit New Music Festival Peter Reynolds

• Belgrade: 17th International Rostrum Donata Premeru

• Leeds: Bingham's ‘Shakespeare Requiem’ Paul Conway

• London: King's Place Opening Festival Jill Barlow

• Further reports from London and Chichester Malcolm Miller, Martin Anderson, John Wheatley

• Tanglewood Festival: Elliott Carter Celebrations Christian Carey

• London, Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere: Proms 2008 Martin Anderson, Malcolm Miller, Rodney Lister, Robert Stein

• Santa Cruz, CA: Christopher Rouse Jeff Dunn

• Brisbane, Australia: Liza Lim's ‘The Navigator’ Sarah Collins

• Cheltenham Festival: Peter Maxwell Davies Paul Conway

• London, Globe Theatre 2008 Jill Barlow

• Manchester, Bridgewater Hall: Halle Taj Festival Tim Mottershead

• Lincoln: Voice and Verse Festival Peter Palmer

• London: Spitalfields Festival 2008 Jill Barlow

• Presteigne Festival: Matthew Taylor Paul Conway

• Further reports from London and Leuven Jill Barlow, John Wheatley

• Munich: Ben-Haim's ‘Joram’ Malcolm Miller

• Los Angeles: Andriessen's ‘The Hague Hacking’ Jeff Dunn

• New York: Kirchner 90th Birthday Celebrations Christian Carey

• Milton Keynes: Wood's Violin Concerto No. 2 Edward Venn

• Tewkesbury: Christopher Steel Paul Conway

• London, Barbican: ‘Total Immersion’ Days John Wheatley

• Leeds: David Sawer's ‘Skin Deep’ Paul Conway

• Opera premières in London Martin Anderson, Malcolm Miller

• Further reports from London and St Albans Jill Barlow, Paul Conway, John Wheatley