This article undertakes a Kleinian analysis of the early feedback works of Éliane Radigue. By reading the melancholic nature of these works – their fixation on the ‘lost objects’ of recorded sound, and the self-recursivity of their feedback techniques – as sonically generative rather than merely mournful, I argue that Radigue's feedback works transcend the signifying order of much elegiac music, offering a distinct intervention and epistemology within the history of musique concrète, electronic music and the sonic arts.

This article considers Éliane Radigue and her use of the modular synthesiser, the ARP 2500, as a conduit for musical expression. It examines her seminal work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) and considers current reconnections to her work, including tribute concerts at the Electronic Music Education and Preservation Project, Philadelphia; Kali Malone’s 2022 album, Living Touch, which uses Radigue’s ARP 2500; and the author’s own experience of recording on the machine. As the article points out, these reconnections complement both electronic music compositional methodologies and their future direction. Radigue’s tactile and collaborative approach with the ARP 2500 is an interaction that embodies both the past and future.

The practice surrounding Éliane Radigue's Occam Océan works may be read as a new form of work concept, one which poses a productive contradiction against the work concept as it has been (and in some cases has been forgotten) and the work concept as we experience it today. Occam Océan poses a challenge to conventional conceptual understandings on many fronts, namely the practice's lack of notation; its collaborative creation; its particular structural criteria; its contingent, iterative and combinatorial manifestations; and, perhaps most significantly, its social reinscription within bodies. By historicising her work against the established work concept structures and identifying how its qualities create friction against them, Radigue's music is shown to create a small rupture at the heart of the concept itself, demonstrating the possibility of establishing radically alternative practices of music exchange and discourse.

This article aims to outline an exploration of the processes of interpretation in electronic music, rooted in my broader engagement with music, technology and performance. The research presented here traverses the boundaries between composition, technology and performance, seeking to understand how these elements interact and inform each other in the practice of electronic music. The article is both a reflection on my past research and a presentation of ongoing explorations, particularly focusing on the interpretation of Éliane Radigue’s Usral (1969). I aim to offer new perspectives on the interpretation of electronic music, highlighting the complexities and opportunities that arise when dealing with non-traditional, often opaque musical tools and methods.

This article is situated within the framework of a definition of curation of new music that includes, in addition to the choice of pieces, venues and players, the active choice of specific tools and roles that will be filled by people, roles that have rich traditions and expectations and are thus ripe for instrumentalisation. In earlier research we have demonstrated that the roles of musicians within new music have been instrumentalised, and in this article we aim to better understand the musicians’ response. One such observable response has been dubbed by artist–researchers Håkon Stene and Louise Devenish as ‘post-instrumental practice’. In this article we will discuss how and where we also observe this trend. We then test its sustainability through in-depth interviews with venue organisers and artistic directors as well as analysing funding and employers’ organisations’ published policies on socially and economically sustainable practices.

This article sketches an interpretation of Olga Neuwirth’s Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie by focusing on the song by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku in the last section of the composition. This Vocaloid song is disturbing because it expresses a conflicted form of subjectivity that is typical of our time. The article considers four different ways to read this expression: as pop-cultural negation of subjectivity, as postmodern celebration of singularity, as post-revolutionary longing for collectivity or as the contemporary mythical counterpart of the capitalist subject form. I argue that the fourth interpretation seems the most promising. According to this interpretation, Neuwirth stages Hatsune Miku as the sirene of digitalised capitalism – a technological mythos against which the contemporary subjectivity tries to constitute itself.

Unlike the pointillist-serial aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, contemporary music employs narrative strategies that stimulate listeners to form mental constructs. This involves using the potential of mid-level formal units to establish orientation points for the listener, exploring two repetitive models (deadlocked time and frozen time) that emerge as discrete building blocks from the current cognitive-theoretical perspective. Through analogical thinking, this article seeks to explain the potential references of these repetition-occurrences towards a temporal suspension and provides multiple examples based on selected passages from Ivan Fedele (b. 1953), Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) and Michael Jarrell (b. 1958). This inquiry suggests an apprehension capable of bringing an expressive stand to the forefront. It also scrutinises how cognitive approaches revolving around analogical thinking can be employed extensively in the analysis of post-tonal music.

Two of the most important creative stimuli for Edward Cowie throughout his composing life have been the natural world and working closely with performers, such as the BBC Singers and Kreutzer Quartet. Over the last four years, he and I have been in the studio recording his bird portrait duo cycles, and three geologically themed piano sonatas collectively titled Rock Music. Reflecting on this music and exploring, through my written correspondence with Cowie, how our outlooks align, offers insights into the relationship between music and the environment, particularly when forms and processes with such a rich history as the sonata are in the frame. The gap between the perspectives of performer and composer is also a lens through which salient interpretative matters can be perceived.

This article reflects on my subjective position in relation to the ways in which time passes in two recent works, Dead Time (2019) and Towards a slowing of the past (2023). I consider how each of these pieces relates to my interest in musical time and demonstrate how the inclusion of pre-recorded materials has allowed me to explore aspects of memory and repetition in new ways. A Deleuzian model of difference and repetition is considered and used to illustrate how becoming might be observed in the mind and body of the perceiver as much as in the materials themselves. I reflect on the complex relationship between the virtual and the real by examining differences in perception between performed events and pre-recorded versions of those same events that are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. I discuss the ways in which sampled material integrated within the performances of these works might evoke different temporal states, such as metaxis, in which we are simultaneously engaged with aspects of pastness and presentness.

Luciano Berio's name appears once in the 1,134-page Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021), yet his poetics sits among the most profound and expansive of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s Berio was writing lucidly about tensions between synchronic and diachronic meaning. Such works as Sinfonia, the Sequenze and the electroacoustic output are radical applications of these ideas, yet they have been claimed by the proponents of the very structures they challenge and their meanings effectively reduced, notwithstanding Berio's insistence and clarity across his substantial writings. This article characterises Berio's work according to his poetics, demonstrating the ways in which Sinfonia actively stages the mechanisms of musical meaning, before situating Berio's writing in a context of contemporary theories of meaning. Particular comparison is made to the work of Harold Bloom, whose words transformed poetic discourse in the 1970s.

This article examines the work of the composer Michelle Lou through its affective and formal mechanisms. I propose that Lou’s work has consistently retained a fundamental and specific orientation towards the listener, which I describe as distance or proximity. In addressing three works spanning eight years – Opening (2008), untitled three-part construction (2014) and HoneyDripper (2016) – I show how the idea of distance informs and is articulated through orchestration, gestural and phrasal construction, scenography and form, and thus frames one’s experience of sound, spatiality, memory, time and perception. While the sounds and materials employed by Lou are often formally cold and sonically abrasive, I argue that her work ultimately implicates and invites the listener in as a crucial element of its sonic ecology, even enacting a sort of phenomenological care over the listener.

This re-evaluation of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is presented as a dialogue between its authors, conducted by email between July and October 2024. The dialogue takes as its starting point a consideration of the continuing relevance of Stockhausen’s music to music today, but begins by tracing the authors’ engagement with this music over the last five decades. The dialogue moves on to the discussion of a series of key aspects of Stockhausen’s work across his creative life, from Kreuzspiel to KLANG: the relationship between his electronic music and his compositional practice for acoustic instruments; form-schemes in his music and, in particular, the development of moment form; and his use of synthesisers. In conclusion, the authors assess Stockhausen’s influence on their own work and the extent of his significance for younger generations of musicians.

The letters sent by the English composer Michael Tippett from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where, a conscientious objector, he spent two months in summer 1943, form a remarkable and important sequence, illuminating not only Tippett's life and compositions but the experience of a gaoled objector to the Second World War. Four prison letters had been thought to survive, documenting in detail his imprisonment, which included turning pages for Benjamin Britten during a recital in the chapel, and conducting the prison orchestra. In 2023 a fifth letter was found, its discovery reported in the national press.1 Its publication is intended to complement the previously released documents, completing what is now a series of five until such time as a collected edition of Tippett's letters, of which only a fifth has seen print, can be undertaken.2