Although much of the best of Britten's unperformed early music has come to light since his death, there are still a number of substantial works to be discovered. The latest to emerge – appropriately premièred at the Royal College of Music where Britten was a student – is the ballet score Plymouth Town, which he composed during his summer holidays in 1931, following his first year at the College. The idea for a ballet was suggested by Violet Alford, an authority on folklore and particularly Basque dancing, who in July 1931 was a fellow lodger in the house in Bayswater where Britten had a room.

• LaMonte Young Rodney Lister

• Skalkottas's 12-Note Music Guy Rickards

• Elliott Carter Christian Carey

• Voicing ‘Pierrot’ Stephanie Power

Gerard Schurmann was born of Dutch parents in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, but spent more than 40 years, including the most formative period of his musical life, in England before moving to the US in 1981. Even during his years in the Netherlands as orchestral conductor with the Dutch Radio in his early twenties, he maintained an apartment in London, sometimes commuting to his place of work in Hilversum. His experience was similar to Bernard van Dieren, another Dutch-born composer who lived in England, although not for as many years as Schurmann: Holland has made no particular move to claim either as a Dutch composer. It was in England that Schurmann developed his skills and persona as a musician, after arriving as a teenager in 1941.

Michael Berkeley's choral and operatic successes have tended to obscure his accomplishments in the field of chamber music, which include a serialist String Trio (1978), two String Quartets and a Clarinet Quintet from the 1980s and the string quartet Torque and Velocity (1997). His latest essay in the genre, Abstract Mirror, for string quintet, was premièred on 11 February 2003 at Bishopsgate Hall by the Chilingirian Quartet, with cellist Stephen Orton. The work was a joint commission by the players and the City Music Society.

In a baffling case of unhelpful scheduling, major new works by Mark-Anthony Turnage were showcased by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra in concerts held at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool and London's Barbican, respectively, on the same evening – 7 February 2013. Apart from necessitating an explanation for the composer's absence from the RLPO concert in their season's programme book, this double booking resulted in audiences being unable to experience live performances of two of Turnage's most substantial recent orchestral pieces. Surely one of these significant premières could have been rescheduled to another date – or, if not, a different time of day, creating a sporting chance to experience both events? Fortunately, the LSO concert was broadcast, enabling those of us who chose to attend the Liverpool concert to catch the London première retrospectively.

It seems improbable that the Tallis Scholars can have given their first concert 40 years ago: while the rest of us have crumbled, their conductor, Peter Phillips, hardly seems older now that he did when he founded the group. New music has been an increasingly important part of their repertoire over the decades, rubbing shoulders with the Renaissance stalwarts, and so it was gratifying that their anniversary concert should feature two world premières and one first London hearing. The venue on 7 March could hardly have been more imposing: the singers were stationed under the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the audience radiating out from them towards three of the four points of the compass; and it seemed that most of the British musical establishment had come to pay homage and say thanks.

• Jukebox Blues Robin Maconie

• ‘New Music, New Allies‘ Rodney Lister

• Cornelius Cardew – A Reader James Weeks

Brazil's foremost ensemble of the late twentieth century, Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, transformed Brazilian contemporary music by cultivating a new mixed-chamber repertory and giving sustained support to a generation of emerging composers. That this cosmopolitan group took, then outgrew, the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone signals the medium it forged: a localized, evolving spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage. This article offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underpin Grupo Novo Horizonte's practices and legacy. Analysing landmark works by Sílvio Ferraz, Harry Crowl and others allows us to draw further connections between the group, the Brazilianness of late twentieth-century compositional aesthetic, and the realities of contemporary classical music-making in Brazil.

Broad textures, clear but unforced musical statements, a focus on tone and sound colour – at the 2015 Estonian Music Days festival all these characteristics of music from the Baltic states were much in evidence, yet its many young composers are all taking these ideas in different directions. The result, judging from the opening weekend of the festival, is a collection of works emerging clearly from a singular musical tradition, but energised by continually expanding diversity and invention. The vibrant new music scene here in Estonia belies the country's diminutive size.

This article draws on published interviews and personal correspondence with the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) to situate the development of his musical aesthetics and international reputation within the context of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022. In particular, the article focuses on Silvestrov's use of sacred musical genres as a means of engaging directly with his contemporary political environment; it also explores the ways in which Silvestrov and his music have recently become an unequivocal symbol of defiance in the face of Russian aggression, a position that stands in stark contrast to the avowed disinterestedness in and removal from politics that characterised his works of the 1970s and 1980s.

On a gloomy winter's night in Dalston what could be better than Kammerklang at Café OTO? Out of the cold and into a packed house – standing room only for many of us, and sauna-like levels of humidity – for an evening in which an audio-visual piece about bells by Christine Sun Kim and a new string quartet by Lisa Illean frame the main event, two new pieces by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller.

Bleak House Farm lies down a muddy track which leads off Heslington Lane, quite close to York's main golf course and a stone's throw from the grey concrete campus of the university. Here, in 1969, in a field more often than not unapproachable without Wellington boots, stood a dilapidated modern caravan just big enough for the occupant and his eight cats. The occupant, who kept halfcopied transparencies of music by himself and his teacher rolled up under the bed, was Vic Hoyland. His motive for such an existence was neither masochism nor romantic self indulgence, but extreme hardship. The cats – all related by vigorous in-breeding – had short legs and voracious appetites.

The Swedish compser Anders Eliasson is a dancer on the volcano of desperation and in this respect the successor of Allan Pettersson. On the other hand his structures are extremely vital and concentrated, without resorting to lengths dictated by atmosphere. The trembling density and shivering complexity of his elaborated architectonics are always emotionally accessible, and the incessantly contrasting rhythmic obsessions never fall into additive isolation; the tearing, torturing tension is under constant formal control, due to the absolute singlemindedness in focussing harmonic development. Eliasson interweaves merciless terror and lyricism from another world.

It was 1970. I was a student in Warsaw. Once a week our composition class would gather at the Academy for an analysis course. We were an odd bunch, a Hungarian pianist, a black Cuban composer, a conductor, two spirited Polish girls, and myself. But we were also typical of the sort of international group that had assembled in the Polish conservatoires at that time—musicians brought together by a common fascination with the Polish School, which was still very much in full flight, and by a determination to unravel its technical and aesthetic mysteries.

With the exception of a few small-scale pieces programmed by the more adventurous contemporary music ensembles, the music of Salvatore Sciarrino has not been performed frequently in this country; BBC Radio 3 has given occasional airtime to larger works, but we have yet to hear much of his most important music in any form. This article should act, I hope, as a pointer to readers who might wish to explore his output on disc, which currently is really the only way to do so in this country.

This article takes up Rebecca Saunders’ comments on the significance of timbre in her work to develop a timbre-centred analytical technique for two of her compositions, Ire (2012), for cello and ensemble, and Still (2011), for violin and orchestra. Two overarching principles are identified: the organisation of the pieces’ sounds into clearly differentiated categories, which can also overlap in different ways, and the use of a phrase-based logic in the pieces’ formal construction. Alongside the timbral construction, stable pitches acquire formal significance by virtue of their rarity and conspicuousness. I also elaborate on the ways in which perceptual ambiguity is fruitfully exploited in these works.