Keiko Devaux (b. 1982) is a Canadian composer, originally from British Columbia, who now lives in Montréal. She began her musical career in piano-performance studies as well as composing, touring and recording several albums in independent rock bands. Her concert music is widely performed throughout Canada and Europe. From 2016–18, Keiko was the composer in residence of Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. She joined Salvatore Sciarrino's masterclasses at L'Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, between the years 2017 and 2019. Keiko was commissioned by music@villaromana festival, Florence, to create Echoic Memories. She is the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music (2020) and is also engaged in a two-year residency as a Carrefour composer with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2020–22). This interview was conducted over Zoom in late spring 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This article considers if and how the five string quartets of the South African composer Michael Blake, written between 2001 and 2014, could be considered as contributing to the compositional and discursive construct that is ‘African art music’. ‘African art music’ has often been evoked in connection with the compositional practices of West African composers especially but has received little consideration and scrutiny of its possible applications to South African composition. The political and artistic isolation of South Africa from the rest of Africa during much of the twentieth century is an obvious reason why this has been the case. But there is also the possibility that white South African composers during and after apartheid have engaged in composition from different intellectual and aesthetic starting points, compared to their African counterparts, due to the specific kind of coloniality they inhabit. The five string quartets afford a perspective on how Michael Blake negotiated the continuities of compositional authority and universalised commitment to a traditional Western sound ideal in the string quartet, with the self-awareness that white composition in post-apartheid South Africa arguably requires.

Hans Abrahamsen has reused the same rhythm across four pieces spanning 33 years: in his Ten Studies, for solo piano, and Six Pieces, for horn trio (both from 1984), in Schnee (2008) and in Three Pieces for Orchestra (2017). Because self-borrowing is crucial to Abrahamsen's compositional practice, this rhythm provides a case study in his compositional priorities, particularly in the role canonic techniques play in his music. Although the rhythm's formal properties lend it a marked asymmetry at the foreground, it is presented in Schnee as part of a canon with highly symmetric pitch materials. But despite this apparent conflict between symmetries and asymmetries, Abrahamsen's music freely combines different approaches to the rhythm, as long as it is linked to a high-register shimmer, suggesting that Abrahamsen's noted uses of canons are largely for textural ends.

This article proposes ways of reimagining how performers and audiences relate to one another during live performances. In contrast to forms of participation where audiences emulate well-known performer and/or composer models, the authors argue for sensitivity to audiences as they present themselves. Attending to, reciprocating and adopting audience behaviour in/as performance can lead to novel interactions, identities and formats for creative practice. The authors discuss pieces by Pauline Oliveros, David Helbich and Carolyn Chen, as well as their own practice research.

This article examines Joan La Barbara's role in New York's Downtown scene, where her career was nurtured. By ‘La Barbara's Downtown’ I mean her perspective on Downtown as reflected in where she performed, who she collaborated with and what she wrote. Beginning with her involvement in the Steve Reich and Philip Glass ensembles in the early 1970s, I follow her through explorations in improvisation with Frederick Rzewski, Garrett List and Charlie Morrow. At the centre is La Barbara's development as an experimentalist composer in various Downtown venues, reinforced by her important collaborations with Alvin Lucier and John Cage. She wrote about the Downtown scene in the SoHo Weekly News in the mid-1970s and after leaving New York continued to write about it in Musical America until the mid-1980s. In all these contexts, I explore the different elements of her experimentalism, which is the overriding thematic of her aesthetic.

This article focuses on Radulescu's 1984 Subconscious Wave, for guitar and pre-recorded digital sound, a work that features on my 2019 solo CD recording Refracted Resonance, for Métier Records, alongside music by Tristan Murail, Christopher Fox, George Holloway and myself. The article places the work in the context of Radulescu's output, demonstrates how it displays the key aesthetic concepts that drive his music and shares my insights into the technical and interpretive aspects of preparing the piece for performance and recording. The article has been adapted from a lecture-recital given at the 2021 edition of the 21st Century Guitar Conference, which was hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Portugal in March 2021.

This article examines the music of composer Ann Cleare, focusing on representative works that display her use of microtonality, unconventional scoring, multimedia and extended techniques. It also discusses Cleare's connection to Irish language and poetry, environmentalism and visual art. Several chamber pieces are analysed. The article concludes with discussion of large-scale compositions, including the eyam cycle about the 1665 plague village in Derbyshire, England, and the forthcoming Brexit opera The Little Lives.

This article considers the recent music of the British composer Richard Emsley. It takes as a framework Tim Ingold's reflections on the creation of knowledge, not as the study of fixed objects but as a study with them, expressed in his 2013 book Making. The article examines the forces of resistance and opportunity that have shaped Emsley's creation of an algorithmic compositional method, and its use and adaptation in two groups of works: the series for piano (1997–) and the cycle Still/s (2002–19). The origins of for piano lie in a creative block that Emsley suffered between 1987 and 1996, during which time he began experimenting with using simple computer programs to create algorithmic compositions. Still/s extends this practice into a cycle of 24 pieces for instrumental quintet, originally inspired by a collaboration with the painter Joan Key. What emerges from both collections of pieces is not a form-based way of making but a practice, out of which forms might be discovered, and which requires skills of attentiveness, or what Ingold calls ‘correspondence’. The origins and subsequent elaborations of both for piano and Still/s show how the music itself has altered Emsley and his ways of working.

Sonorama is a 2015 sonic artwork by Claudia Molitor, consisting of a number of audio files designed for listening on a train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, and a graphic score based on the composer's own ‘reading’ of this journey. This article analyses the relationship between the sonic and the spatial in the work, exploring how Molitor's site-specific composition interacts with its environment on multiple scales. By drawing on the strategy of ‘situated listening’ developed by Gascia Ouzounian, as well as urbanist language introduced by Richard Sennett, this article seeks to elucidate the relationship between a number of ‘nested’ spaces, present across varying realisations, and the political agenda that energises the work. Written in the midst of summer 2015's European refugee crisis, the work brings into sharp focus themes of British exceptionalism, immigration and inclusion.

This article discusses touch-related works by the British composer–performer Andy Ingamells, works that that make up a large part of his oeuvre. In particular the article focuses on a series of works created during the last decade: Tape Piece (2012), The Ticklish Subject (2013), Having never seen (a) Ghost (2014), Waschen (2015), He That Plays The English Gentlemen Shall Be Welcome (2016), Petting Zoo (2019) and Petting Pisco (2020). These works exemplify Ingamells' understanding of music in general, but now, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, they can also be seen very differently as a commentary on social activities that people had to forego because of contact restrictions during the pandemic.

Eight ‘listening sketches’ form the basis of an interview with experimental vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara. The conversation, a retrospective of La Barbara's compositions, is divided into four sections: Early experiments; Multi-track works; Words; New and recent works – pandemic times.