In an age when music has become increasingly mechanistic and more concerned with sound than content; when the language of music has become a veritable tower of Babel addressing itself to minorities of minorities; when dense ingenuity, often accompanied by pages of notes explaining what it is doing, is hardly even penetrable by the eye let alone the ear, and memorability is often more minimal than the minimalists, Hans Gál is bound to be a lone voice. He is, after all, 95 years old and learnt his craft from distinguished masters of the 19th century, imbibing the classical tradition in a world which could still lay some claim to civilization: that is before the First World War set in train increasingly rapid developments in technology and a steady decline in standards. If the artist's task is to reflect the world around him, then he has done this admirably. If he aims to expose society's weaknesses, it would seem that the forces of evil are winning. If he aims to console and heal—creating images of reconciliation in a barren world, as Tippett so tellingly puts it—then Hans Gál has certainly played his part in this reconciliation and it is our loss that his music is so little known in this country. Surprising, too, for he has been with us for nearly 45 years, composing, conducting, teaching, lecturing, and playing, but having no gimmicks to offer, no ad-man to promote him; and thus, being an essentially private man, never seeking to impose himself—‘the most unpushy composer I have ever met’ as one German radio producer puts it—comparatively few have had a chance to discover his worth.

• Wilfrid Mellers Between Worlds Geoffrey Alvarez

• Ernest Ansermet on Music Peter Palmer

• Proms 2002 (1): Nørgård andTurnage Robert Stein

• Proms 2002 (2): Sawyer, Payne etc Martin Anderson

• London: Emigré composers Malcolm Miller

• Three Choirs Festival: Lionel Sainsbury's Violin Concerto Raymond Head

• Limousin: Roger Steptoe Malcolm Mille

Strawinsky often surprises his admirers. When they believe themselves to have discovered his æsthetic aims or located his place in history, he suddenly escapes from their observant eyes to emerge on quite a different spot where nobody had suspected him to dwell. His most recent works, the Cantata on old English poems, the Septet, and the Shakespeare Songs, show a contrapuntal strictness of a very special kind, which he has never attempted before.

In this interview Gubaidulina discusses her understanding of religion and the way in which it relates to her music, by means of symbolism and metaphor. In particular she speaks of her understanding of the Apocalypse as a book of light, greatly influenced by the writings of Fr Aleksandr Men. She talks about the symbolism of instruments in her work, notably percussion, which she sees as a way to the subconscious; her understanding of the role of modernism in music, and the way in which her work connects with this historical process; and also her use of the Fibonacci sequence. The relationship of her music to liturgy is discussed, as is the double path, apparently contradictory, of the artist who composes both liturgical and concert music. The experience of the composer during the profound changes in music during the 20th century, specifically as regards possible intersections between modernism and spirituality, are also discussed.

Leonid Desyatnikov is one of the most successful Russian composers of his generation and one of the most distinctive and individual on the contemporary Russian scene. He represents a rare instance of a contemporary composer in his mid-forties who has had all his works performed, some of them on many occasions. In the West, his music has been played by the Deutsche Sym-phony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His vocal cycle Five poems by F. Tyutchev has been performed recently in London and Aldeburgh. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Gidon Kremer became the main champion of Desyatnikov's music; he has commissioned, performed and recorded a number of Desyatnikov's original works as well as his arrangements of Astor Piazzolla's music. To date, Kremer has performed Desyatnikov's Russian Seasons, for violin, female voice and string orchestra, composed in 2000, fifteen times in Europe, the Baltic countries and Russia. On 1 May 2002, he will present its American premiére at Carnegie Hall. The fact that Kremer, who earlier brought the music of such composers as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina to international attent ion, has now ‘chosen’ Desyatnikov speaks volumes for the quality of the music.

Contemporary music festivals are a neatly packaged way of encountering a variety of new and recent pieces, where someone else has done the hard work and chosen them for you. In our online/streaming life, rather than surfing Bandcamp or similar and following our own predilections, these festivals, in a healthy way, force you to confront your musical barriers and to harmonise your prejudices. In the UK and Ireland, Ilan Volkov's Glasgow Tectonics, Eamon Quinn's Louth and Graham McKenzie's Huddersfield seem to me the most interesting at the moment. There are, of course, other useful and enterprising festivals: some are a mixed bag of old and new, some are composer-led or have other agendas, so they have built-in filtering – in other words, prejudices. Festival directors have their likes and dislikes too, I guess, but the evidence from the three mentioned above demonstrates an openness and a researched risk-taking: Huddersfield, with McKenzie in charge, is more open than most, presenting quite a range of different genres and media.

One of the consequences of the extreme paucity of new music broadcasting in Britain is that it is extraordinarily hard to keep up with the output of the major creative talents working in continental Europe. If we leave aside the already-canonical elder figures, only a handful of composers get anything like reasonable coverage (depending on one's definition of ‘reasonable’ — can one new work in four or five really be considered sufficient?). Others seem to have dropped out of listening range altogether. Such is the case with the Romanian-French composer Horatiu Radulescu, now 63 and by any standards one of the most fascinating and individual creative figures of his generation, whose music has been shamefully neglected by the BBC for more years than anyone would care to mention. Besides the usual sorts of prefabricated excuses why this is so (so many composers, so little available broadcast time), one speculates about further reasons. Is Radulescu's music considered simply too weird, too extreme, for Radio 3 listeners? Yes, his pieces are sometimes quite long; yes, they sometimes have strange titles (Capricorn's Nostalgic Crickets; Dizzy Divinity, I; Dr Kai Hong's Diamond Mountain); yes, they are sometimes not easy to digest at one listening. But isn't exposure to the cutting edge of the performing arts one of the things we should reasonably expect from our broadcasting media, especially in the case of a radical artist of such distinction and achievement?

St Albans: International Organ Festival 2005

Little can be said about music during the last century without encountering the men and women who supported it financially. Pierre Bourdieu's impression that the services rendered freely for the good of society reinforce a symbolic debt between giver and recipient complicates motivations behind patronage. Indeed, applying Bourdieu's theory to altruism in general – here, patronage in particular – highlights what could be thought of as a performance of futility: both giver and receiver understand the tenacious terms yet agree nonetheless to act out the process of reaching equilibrium. In the case of iconic music patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009), her support of the avant-garde seems, at times, to call into question on what side of this ‘performed futility’ she existed. This article considers ways in which Freeman's work as patron of the musical avant-garde allowed her to perform her identity as a woman and mother among a community on the fringe.

This study explores Adams's interpretation of Baroque genres and his creative methods that draw on a relationship between past and present in the Violin Concerto. In this composition, Adams not only revives Baroque musical language through new performance practices, but also draws together diverse musical idioms, creating a way to communicate with our society. Repetition plays a large part in the Violin Concerto, but more in the sense of variation and sequences than of literal repetition. On the other hand, techniques such as the Lombard Snap and “unequal-note’ (notes inégales) are not treated in a traditional way. Structurally, although there is no trace of motivic connexion throughout the work, the music does not lack stylistic unity. The ‘harmonic’ language is generally consonant, which reflects Adams's honor of conventional musical sound. The Concerto certainly demonstrates the composer's creative imagination.

The idea of commissioning modern preludes to preface well established pillars of the classical repertoire has apparently been done a few years ago with soft new sounds gracing the air as audiences picnicked as a lead up to performances of Mozart's operas at Glyndebourne. Conversely one hears of The Departure of the Queen of Sheba, and other novelties. However, when conductor George Vass, musical director of the Presteigne Festival, commissioned three modern preludes to Handel's Messiah, to celebrate his tenth anniversary at the festival (2002), this must qualify as a ‘first’, and his brainchild. The Presteigne Festival is well known for its commitment to contemporary classical music. This was an ideal opportunity to commission three major British composers, to make their own 21st century ‘commentaries’ on Messiah, using the same instrumental forces available to Handel. As he also directs St Albans Choral Society, they put on the Messiah 25 October 2003, at St Albans Cathedral, prefaced by the three new preludes in the presence of two of the composers, Cecilia McDowall and David Matthews, using Orchestra Nova from the Presteigne Festival.

In the process of my research on the topic ‘The Soviet Avant-Garde from the 1970s to the present’, I learned that one of the heroes (actually, the heroine) of my studies, Sofia Gubaidulina, had been invited by San Jose State University School of Music for a festival of her music. The annual festivals in the SJSU, called ‘The Annual Guest Composers Series’, are each dedicated to the music of a specific contemporary composer. The guests of previous ‘Series’ were Morton Subotnik (1993) and Mario Davidowsky (1994); the festival in 1995 was devoted to Gubaidulina; George Crumb was selected for the following festival in 1996.

Even a decade and more after the fall of Communism, one regularly hears sorry tales of the difficulties faced by the countries of the east as they adapt to a more liberal order: Russian health-care in meltdown, the Romanian economy struggling, St Petersburg pumping untreated sewage into the Baltic, Belarus still in the grip of a Stalinist despot …. In the circumstances, contemporary music in the Baltics seems to be in remarkably good health, with two longstanding festivals in Estonia, another in Lithuania and a new event emerging in Latvia all providing encouraging testimony of the vigour of the new-music scene in the three republics.

The first part of this article was published in Tempo No.194 (October 1995), pp. 2–11, and dealt with Goffredo Petrassi's first two Concertos for Orchestra as well as other works, notably the major choral compositions Coro di Morti and Noche Oscura. At the time Petrassi was 91 years of age and it was intended to complete the article within a few issues' time. Other commitments supervened, however; but the composer's death has given added urgency to the need to publish a second instalment concentrating on his concertos of the 1950s. A third and final instalment, covering Concertos 7 and 8 and some of the remarkable compositions of Petrassi's final period, is planned for 2004.

In his writings on music Hans Keller includes Skalkottas among the few great twentieth-century composers of ‘symphonic thought’, and considers him to be the only ‘symphonic genius’ after Schoenberg whose ‘genius’ remains to be discovered. Although during the time of his writings, Keller was in a minority in his appreciation of this relatively minor composer in the Western art music canon, he did not analyse any of Skalkottas's music in support of his views, as he did with the works of other composers who, although important to him, are not elevated to such a high plane. This paper first gives an overview of Keller's approach to and understanding of symphonic thought, as presented in his various writings and exemplified in his analyses of Schoenberg's music. Subsequently, it examines certain of Skalkottas's 12-note works and the compositional techniques he applies to construct them, which exhibit these characteristics of symphonic thought defined by Keller, and which might be used to substantiate his unexplained but intuitively correct assertions.

The Webern Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung inBasel holds a fair copy of an early version of theDrei Stücke für Streichquartett(1913), comprising the song ‘Schmerz, immer Blicknach über’ together with what later became numbers 1and 6 of the Sechs Bagatellen op.9.This document is highly interesting on many counts:here I will mainly discuss one, the existence of adiscarded ending to the third piece (later op.9no.6). This passage is heavily blacked-out in mauvepencil in the manuscript, but the notes, dynamicsand indications can be discerned with a strong lightand magnifying glass.

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.

Songs without Voices, composed in 1991–2, is a set of four pieces for small instrumental ensemble comprising flute, cor anglais, clarinet, horn, piano, violin, viola and cello, lasting about eleven minutes. It follows on naturally from Knussen's Whitman Settings which preceded it, as three of its four movements derive their main melodic lines from purely instrumental settings of Whitman texts from the collection Leaves of Grass. Indeed the first movement's source text, Soon shall the winter's foil be here, is placed by Whitman in the collection immediately after The Voice of the Rain, the final text of Knussen's Whitman Settings.