The student of Swiss music history cannot but notice certain parallels in the lives of that country's finest composers – parallels that seem, at first glance, to explain why the student of Swiss music history is such a rare creature. Theodor Fröhlich (1803–1836) left Switzerland to study with Zelter in Berlin. Instead of staying to seek fame and fortune in the Prussian metropolis thereafter, he returned to his native Aarau, where he was forced to earn his keep by conducting assorted amateur choirs and ensembles. Johann Carl Eschmann (1826–1882) studied with Mendelssohn in Leipzig, began a promising career by experimenting with modernistic cyclic structures, but then relegated himself to conducting amateur choirs in darkest Canton Schaffhausen. Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957) studied in Leipzig with Reger, but he too soon returned home to tread in his forebears' footsteps. Numerous others followed the same path. It is as if the culprit were a common genetic trait, some strand of DNA that led generations of Swiss composers briefly to the Teutonic north before compelling them to plunge back into Helvetic obscurity. Or perhaps the yearning to hear cowbells tinkle and see the twinkle of brightly polished doorknobs on distant Alpine chalets is so overwhelming as to propel homewards any Swiss musician sojourning abroad for more than a few months. The cynic may scoff; but the present writer, in voluntary exile from his erstwhile Helvetic homeland, can vouch for the attraction of both.

SCHOENBERG: String Quartets Nos.1–4; String Quartet in D major; Presto in C major; Scherzo in F major. Aron Quartet (Ludwig Müller, Barna Kobori, Georg Hamann, Christophe Pantillon) with Anna Maria Pammer (sop). Preiser Records PR 90572 (3-CD set).

This article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.

• London, Royal Opera House: ‘Promised End’ Tim Mottershead

• Amsterdam: Raskatov's ‘A Dog's Heart’ Alexander Ivashkin

• Glasgow: James Dillon's ‘Nine Rivers’ Paul Conway

• Zurich: Dalbavie's ‘Gesualdo’ Peter Palmer

• Tanglewood Festival 2010 Christian Carey

• Manchester: Friedrich Cerha Kaleidoscope Tim Mottershead

• Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2010 Paul Conway

• Further reports from London, Manchester, Birmingham, St Albans Martin Anderson, Jill Barlow, Tim Mottershead, Paul Conway

London: Music We'd Like To Hear, March–April 2006

• Reviews by Paul Conway, Bret Johnson, Brian Thompson, Peter Palmer, Arnold Whittall, Calum MacDonald, Michael Graubart, Tim Mottershead

In 1986 I made six programmes about The Mysterious Art of the Conductor for the BBC's World Service. These derived from Interviews with nine conductors, among them Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Charles Mackerras. Each programme lasted half-an-hour and included music examples. The interviews were much longer, but each was filleted and spliced so as to juxtapose – and sometimes contrast – the views of different conductors on particular aspects of their art. The interview with Pierre Boulez, reproduced here in full, was recorded in Broadcasting House on 25 October 1986. It gave me special pleasure and is, I believe, of special interest.

I have been asked on a number of occasions recently whether I felt a heavy weight of responsibility during my work on Elgar's Third Symphony, and if this was an inhibiting factor. The question put me in a rather awkward situation, since a truthful answer was going to show me in a very immodest light. The fact is, my work on the project seemed to lie outside any feelings of awe and moral responsibility – because, quite simply, I was in love with the music and laboured for the sheer joy of it, without thought of ethical issues.

The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

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.

While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context, and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself. This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic music offered as examples.

The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interesting to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another. Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of them.

I Well Remember hearing my first Rorem work—his Symphony No. 3 of 1959, with its wealth of melody and uninhibited joie de vivre. I determined to hear more and soon realized that there has been too little comment on him (not to mention performances!) on this side of the Atlantic. His reputation, earned in the 1950's and 1960's, as ‘America's foremost composer of art songs’ has been consolidated whilst he has been venturing into many other areas of musical terrain. Indeed, he has been a busy man—with more than 30 major works to his credit since 1970: and since his reputation as a composer of large-scale orchestral and choral works is less clearly perceived in this country, I propose to concentrate on this aspect in a brief survey of how his art has developed in recent years.

Nearly all our famous composers have now seen their names blazoned across the ‘credit titles’ of what America calls ‘motionpictures.’ The plot may be moronic, the dialogue the most basic English, but the music may now scale the Olympian heights of classical austerity, or plumb the mazy depths of atonality and every other form of modern anti-romanticism. Gone are the days when studios shunned doctors of music like straphangers dodge the passenger sneezing in a tube. Counterpoint is no longer contraband, nor fugue verboten, a man may make a canon without being fired.

SALLINEN: The Palace Rhapsody, op. 72.1 AHO: Tristia.1 RAUTAVAARA: A Soldier's Mass, op. 40.2 KANTELINEN: Ghosts.2 The Guards' Band c. 1Elias Seppälä, 2Raine Ampuja. Alba ABCD 170.

Picking the chocolate-coated plums – a traditional Polish treat – from the abundance of riches on offer at the 45th annual Warsaw Autumn Festival (20–28 September 2002) sets a delectable challenge. Most of the concerts were packed, and predominantly with young people; its events were held in venues ranging from the elegant National Philharmonic to the sleek Warsaw Stock Exchange; and a typically diverse range of contemporary music, programmed with insight and performed with great commitment, drew enthusiastic – and occasionally enthusiastically critical – responses from the audiences. Indeed, while the plentiful supply of complimentary chocolate bars from sponsors E. Wedel certainly helped sustain energy levels during the nine hectic days of events, the reflexive stylistic juxtapositions created this Autumn's true momentum.

In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

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.

JOHN TAVENER: Schuon Lieder. Patricia Rozaro (sop), Gillian McDonagh (temple bowls), The Schubert Ensemble. Black Box BBM1101.