This article undertakes a Kleinian analysis of the early feedback works of Éliane Radigue. By reading the melancholic nature of these works – their fixation on the ‘lost objects’ of recorded sound, and the self-recursivity of their feedback techniques – as sonically generative rather than merely mournful, I argue that Radigue's feedback works transcend the signifying order of much elegiac music, offering a distinct intervention and epistemology within the history of musique concrète, electronic music and the sonic arts.

Composer-Performer Collaboration (CPC) has become a distinct research field in the last twenty years. This article explores a long letter written by Justin Connolly to Neil Heyde in place of final workshops for Collana, for solo cello. The letter sheds forensic light on Connolly’s musical vision and approach to collaboration, revealing a distinctive combination of pedantic concern for details (with concomitant precision of notation) and great flexibility. Connolly encourages the performer as an active participant, with responsibility for a ‘parallel universe of discourse’. Heyde responds directly to extracts from the letter and outlines the shared working context. Connolly’s letter confirms the significance of the dimensions of notation, gesture and instrumental choreography that have emerged in the CPC literature but affords a perspective not shaped by academic demand characteristics. It presents an especially sophisticated approach to what recent writing has called empathetic embodiment.

This article considers Éliane Radigue and her use of the modular synthesiser, the ARP 2500, as a conduit for musical expression. It examines her seminal work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) and considers current reconnections to her work, including tribute concerts at the Electronic Music Education and Preservation Project, Philadelphia; Kali Malone’s 2022 album, Living Touch, which uses Radigue’s ARP 2500; and the author’s own experience of recording on the machine. As the article points out, these reconnections complement both electronic music compositional methodologies and their future direction. Radigue’s tactile and collaborative approach with the ARP 2500 is an interaction that embodies both the past and future.

The practice surrounding Éliane Radigue's Occam Océan works may be read as a new form of work concept, one which poses a productive contradiction against the work concept as it has been (and in some cases has been forgotten) and the work concept as we experience it today. Occam Océan poses a challenge to conventional conceptual understandings on many fronts, namely the practice's lack of notation; its collaborative creation; its particular structural criteria; its contingent, iterative and combinatorial manifestations; and, perhaps most significantly, its social reinscription within bodies. By historicising her work against the established work concept structures and identifying how its qualities create friction against them, Radigue's music is shown to create a small rupture at the heart of the concept itself, demonstrating the possibility of establishing radically alternative practices of music exchange and discourse.

Methods of critique fashion their possible outcomes. Rita Felski (2015) makes the case for ‘postcritique’, a method of reading in which texts are worked with, understood in their own right, such that a more diverse range of styles and arguments might be understood. Robert T. Tally Jr. (2022) rejects this method, contending that postcritique claims to serve the text under analysis but, in adopting a standpoint of placid agreement, facilitates a mode of reading that diminishes the potency of the text itself and critical dialogue more generally. This article argues that postcritique has dominated the discourse surrounding ‘The New Discipline’, a manifesto of sorts written by composer Jennifer Walshe. The article offers an alternative critical reading of ‘The New Discipline’, arguing that the text is itself a Jennifer Walshe piece. The composer performs the role of a musicologist who falsely declares newness, inconsistently includes and excludes artists, and deploys a vague, if not contradictory, definition of bodies. The manifesto is addressed to an undisclosed but seemingly specific audience. I argue that these apparent shortcomings evoke themes of performance, irony and fictionalisation that are found elsewhere in Walshe’s work and make such a reading licit.

This article aims to outline an exploration of the processes of interpretation in electronic music, rooted in my broader engagement with music, technology and performance. The research presented here traverses the boundaries between composition, technology and performance, seeking to understand how these elements interact and inform each other in the practice of electronic music. The article is both a reflection on my past research and a presentation of ongoing explorations, particularly focusing on the interpretation of Éliane Radigue’s Usral (1969). I aim to offer new perspectives on the interpretation of electronic music, highlighting the complexities and opportunities that arise when dealing with non-traditional, often opaque musical tools and methods.

This article is situated within the framework of a definition of curation of new music that includes, in addition to the choice of pieces, venues and players, the active choice of specific tools and roles that will be filled by people, roles that have rich traditions and expectations and are thus ripe for instrumentalisation. In earlier research we have demonstrated that the roles of musicians within new music have been instrumentalised, and in this article we aim to better understand the musicians’ response. One such observable response has been dubbed by artist–researchers Håkon Stene and Louise Devenish as ‘post-instrumental practice’. In this article we will discuss how and where we also observe this trend. We then test its sustainability through in-depth interviews with venue organisers and artistic directors as well as analysing funding and employers’ organisations’ published policies on socially and economically sustainable practices.

This article sketches an interpretation of Olga Neuwirth’s Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie by focusing on the song by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku in the last section of the composition. This Vocaloid song is disturbing because it expresses a conflicted form of subjectivity that is typical of our time. The article considers four different ways to read this expression: as pop-cultural negation of subjectivity, as postmodern celebration of singularity, as post-revolutionary longing for collectivity or as the contemporary mythical counterpart of the capitalist subject form. I argue that the fourth interpretation seems the most promising. According to this interpretation, Neuwirth stages Hatsune Miku as the sirene of digitalised capitalism – a technological mythos against which the contemporary subjectivity tries to constitute itself.

Studying Arik Shapira’s 1982/2003 opera Aqedah (Binding), this article probes the boundaries of Shapira’s resistance to the Zionist ideological apparatus. Having set the banishment of Ishmael (Genesis 21) side by side with the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), Shapira highlighted the intricate network of correspondences between these two stories while restoring balance to Jewish victimhood, which usually excluded Ishmael in favour of politically actualising Isaac. To reflect the brutality embedded in these biblical stories (nationally appropriated or not), Shapira disintegrated the text into syllables to which he assigned mostly even durations and inert pitches; the result was a deliberately unemotional and stringent reportage, whose violent conveyance equalled its desemanticisation. Shapira’s use of musical and textual ready-mades in the third movement of Aqedah is situated here alongside an oratorio that reverences similar ready-mades, and in so doing affirms the nationalisation of the Holocaust (Noam Sheriff’s The Revival of the Dead), and a poem by Yizhak Laor, which marks a dialectical threshold Shapira could never cross. Despite his ensnarement, Shapira’s almost vandalistic approach signalled the separation of art music from territorial nationalism.

Unlike the pointillist-serial aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, contemporary music employs narrative strategies that stimulate listeners to form mental constructs. This involves using the potential of mid-level formal units to establish orientation points for the listener, exploring two repetitive models (deadlocked time and frozen time) that emerge as discrete building blocks from the current cognitive-theoretical perspective. Through analogical thinking, this article seeks to explain the potential references of these repetition-occurrences towards a temporal suspension and provides multiple examples based on selected passages from Ivan Fedele (b. 1953), Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) and Michael Jarrell (b. 1958). This inquiry suggests an apprehension capable of bringing an expressive stand to the forefront. It also scrutinises how cognitive approaches revolving around analogical thinking can be employed extensively in the analysis of post-tonal music.

Neoclassicism is now largely eschewed within New Music. While there seems space in our pluralistic scene for modernist, postmodernist, minimalist, performative and conceptual music, the compositional values of neoclassicism seem out of step and anachronistic. This article advocates that classical principles should be put back on the table, arguing not for a return to a historical neoclassicism but rather for idiosyncratic forms of neoclassicism that emphasise characteristics such as entertainment, playfulness, clarity, forms of tonality and engagement with received form.