Getting to grips with Harrison Birtwistle's ever expanding oeuvre is becoming an increasingly challenging business. The forthcoming South Bank Centre festival naturally provides occasion for some critical stocktaking. Yet the retrospective schemas within which composers' works are traditionally placed seem less than usually appropriate. The idea of linear development is of as limited use to understanding Birtwistle's creative progress as it is to explaining his musical forms. Contrasting musical surfaces, for instance, testify to the difficulty of useful generalization about the recent works' lineage. Whereas the crisp, pulse-based clarity of many pages in The Cry of Anubis bears comparison with moments in Earth Dances and the contemporaneous Words Overheard, Panic's impenetrable textures and sonorities are more reminiscent of the earlier Verses for Ensembles and An Imaginary Landscape. The treatment of musical form in the recent works similarly resists summary description.

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.

Since his death in 1970 Roberto Gerhard's posthumous reputation has suffered from precisely the kind of neglect that seems to follow the death of many a major artist. For those admirers in Britain and Spain expecting to have to wait for the centenary of his birth in 1996 for any kind of reassessment, 1992 provided an unexpected, and very welcome, interim bonus.

One is always hearing it stated as an argument against opera that for quite a considerable time, say the last twenty-five years, nothing has been composed which has achieved world fame or even maintained its place in the repertory for a single generation. Yet a really thorough and knowledgeable examination—that is to say, one not impaired by partisan, doctrinaire points of view—would show that in the period from 1900 to 1950 a whole row of significant creations in the realm of music drama have come into being, which were wrongly judged as decadent, old fashioned, repetitive, eccentric or over ambitious, and were therefore put on the shelf until they suddenly rose up again through a lively new production, like the Phoenix from its ashes. So it was with Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten when, on 1st October 1949, it had its first performance on the American continent at the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires.

The relationship between the musical thinking of Gustav Mahler and Peter Maxwell Davies becomes ever more apparent, and in the ‘Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine’ it takes on crucial importance.

The connection manifests itself immediately in the two composers' attitudes towards ‘surface’. A musical image is an abstraction of psychic content and must be given corporeal identity before it is communicable. Musical composition is the crystallization of the image into specific note-configurations of pitch, rhythm, timbre, register, etc. which taken together comprise the surface of a work. The act of listening then reverses the process by going from the surface back to the image. Composition is translation and listening is retranslation.

Varèse Rodney Lister

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.

As a pianist I spent many hours practising the connection between my touching and my listening, adjusting the pressure and weight of touching the keyboard to elicit just the right sonic texture in a note. As a composer I have spent years exploring the connection between my embodied act of notating and its potential sonic reality. Both these endeavours are acts of honing cross-modal activity. As I continue to qualify my experiences of sound and working with sound through language in instances like this – writing about my practice – I find myself constructing an increasingly complex and expanding web of linguistic gymnastics, in an attempt to explain, explore and grasp the slippery subject of listening.

In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.

Just as a young grand master chooses, with a degree of self-acknowledgement, an opening that creates space for key playing strengths at a later stage, Jörg Widmann seems with every new work to alight on an initial strategy (usually in the form of just a single sound or a complex but discrete sonic entity) which not only occasions further related ideas in the composer's imagination but also reveals feasible compositional paths through the new material. In performance, this simultaneity of creation – in which the primary gesture is clearly a microcosm of the piece itself – may be perceived too in real time by the audience. Any closer analogy with the game of chess breaks down at this point: Widmann's openings remain ambiguous, marked by both a tentative approach and moved by a desire for more telling blows to render a score complete. Music – or the calling to write it, at least – remains nonetheless a considerable opponent. And the sense of the composer finding his bearings at the outset (one might say the onset) of a piece is palpable. A febrile tension is created.

The musical climate of the 1920s, when Copland came to maturity, was not favourable to the use of popular or traditional material or idioms in ‘serious’ composition. Nationalism was no longer a powerful force in the Western world. Increased respect for folk-musics as cultural relics inhibited composers from using them freely as composition sources. Popular music was associated with commercial exploitation and the wooing of a mass audience on the lowest common level, serious music with uncompromising devotion to Art for Art's sake. The leaders of revolutionary movements—Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, each in different ways—upheld the negative principle that one must not walk where men had walked before. The melodic and harmonic idioms of serious and popular music were growing steadily apart, serious music concentrating its meanings, increasingly concerned with a microstructure in which every detail was to be personal and expressive, popular music freely accepting melodic and harmonic cliché as an integral part of the language. Serious music rejected exact repetition as a means of driving home the message, popular music was heavily repetitive. Serious music often depended on intellectual construction-methods not to be appreciated by the unprepared listener; popular music demanded that all meanings should be immediately apparent.

The structural significance of the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones is expressed in the following statements by Arnold Schoenberg in ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (Style and Idea, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, p. 107):

After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundation for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones which are related only with one another.

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.

Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex is not a book which has pleased everybody, but it was the starting-point of this opera. This is not the place to analyse the book's deficiencies, real or alleged, but to assert that it tells skilfully a tense and dramatic story based upon historical persons and happenings. The late Sir Desmond MacCarthy, in his recently published Memories, recalls an interesting opinion that Elizabeth and Essex is almost a sketch for a play and that Strachey's method was inspired by or borrowed from the Elizabethan stage. Both the composer and the librettist of Gloriana were able to see in the book a sketch for an opera, and both are ready to acknowledge their debt to Strachey's dramatic sense. This does not mean that Gloriana is wholly based upon Elizabeth and Essex, or that it has emerged merely as an operatic version of that book. In the first place the makers of an opera are not under the obligation of even a picturesque biographer like Strachey to stick closely to history or chronology. Secondly, the makers of this particular opera came to be less concerned than Strachey with the amatory motives of the two principal characters and more concerned with the Queen's pre-eminence as a Queen, a woman, and a personality.

Contemporary æsthetic theory is inevitably becoming involved in half-truths. There is a constant bifurcation of concepts, with one aspect often emerging as a unique value while the other is eliminated. Thus, many insist that music achieves its loftiest aims by suppressing form and concentrating on feeling. Within the category of feeling it is further insisted that only the loftiest feelings are admissible into the loftiest music. Or there are those who deny feeling; and those, like Satie and Weill who, legitimately fed up with the nineteenth-century ‘sérieux a tout prix,’ have gone to the other extreme of music with only the most ignoble content.

Jörg Widmann's work embraces everything music history – and beyond – has to offer: Lachenmann, Boulez, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke's Late Sonnets and the Screaming Pope paintings of Francis Bacon. His transformative re-imagining of traditional forms is seen nowhere better than in the Jagdquartett, the third in a cycle of five quartets that comprise the core of his œuvre. In the interview around which this article is based he discusses the Jagdquartett and its inspirations in detail, and the possibility of his music representing a kind of meta-modernism.

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.

My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.

‘Synthrumentation’ is a technique for the resynthesis of speech with acoustic instruments developed by the composer Clarence Barlow in the early 1980s. Over the past decade instrumental speech synthesis has been thematised by a diverse range of composers (e.g. Peter Ablinger and Jonathan Harvey); however, Barlow's work is rarely accorded the credit it deserves for the pioneering role it played in this field. This article seeks to explain the basic mechanics of the synthrumentation technique and to demonstrate its practical application through an analysis of Barlow's ensemble piece Im Januar am Nil composed between 1981 and 1984. It should become apparent that Barlow never uses synthrumentation in its conceptually pure form, but rather its realisation is always integrated into an overarching musical context, which reflects Barlow's general approach to musical invention allowing different factors to interact.