This article explores the extent to which Michael Zev Gordon’s A Kind of Haunting is a work of postmemory, a concept defined and refined by Marianne Hirsch to describe memories inherited by the generations that follow one that has experienced great collective trauma. I complicate some of the claims around the efficacy of music as a site of postmemorial aesthetics by considering the limits of musical representation in Gordon’s work via theories of spectacle and orientalism.

This article reflects on my subjective position in relation to the ways in which time passes in two recent works, Dead Time (2019) and Towards a slowing of the past (2023). I consider how each of these pieces relates to my interest in musical time and demonstrate how the inclusion of pre-recorded materials has allowed me to explore aspects of memory and repetition in new ways. A Deleuzian model of difference and repetition is considered and used to illustrate how becoming might be observed in the mind and body of the perceiver as much as in the materials themselves. I reflect on the complex relationship between the virtual and the real by examining differences in perception between performed events and pre-recorded versions of those same events that are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. I discuss the ways in which sampled material integrated within the performances of these works might evoke different temporal states, such as metaxis, in which we are simultaneously engaged with aspects of pastness and presentness.

Two of the most important creative stimuli for Edward Cowie throughout his composing life have been the natural world and working closely with performers, such as the BBC Singers and Kreutzer Quartet. Over the last four years, he and I have been in the studio recording his bird portrait duo cycles, and three geologically themed piano sonatas collectively titled Rock Music. Reflecting on this music and exploring, through my written correspondence with Cowie, how our outlooks align, offers insights into the relationship between music and the environment, particularly when forms and processes with such a rich history as the sonata are in the frame. The gap between the perspectives of performer and composer is also a lens through which salient interpretative matters can be perceived.

The radical expansion of the written score as art object in late-twentieth and twenty-first-century music resulted in a rapid porting of extramusical objects into music’s textual realm, including a wide array of linguistic graphemes newly treated as musical material. This article suggests that the modern compositional use of scored parentheses, although rarely undertaken for identical aesthetic or formal ends, nevertheless always involves the generation of a virtual site for intimacy between irreconcilable bodies. Parentheses radically reveal the fragile contingencies of fallible musical embodiment: every– thing, every language, every intention, every body as foreign to everything else and yet nothing as foreign at all. Musical parentheses are the privileged site where the I knows that ‘I am not you’, that ‘you are not I’, that ‘you I do not know you I do not know’ – which is to say: they will reappear by the end as love.

Luciano Berio's name appears once in the 1,134-page Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021), yet his poetics sits among the most profound and expansive of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s Berio was writing lucidly about tensions between synchronic and diachronic meaning. Such works as Sinfonia, the Sequenze and the electroacoustic output are radical applications of these ideas, yet they have been claimed by the proponents of the very structures they challenge and their meanings effectively reduced, notwithstanding Berio's insistence and clarity across his substantial writings. This article characterises Berio's work according to his poetics, demonstrating the ways in which Sinfonia actively stages the mechanisms of musical meaning, before situating Berio's writing in a context of contemporary theories of meaning. Particular comparison is made to the work of Harold Bloom, whose words transformed poetic discourse in the 1970s.

This article presents an overview of findings from an ERC-funded DigiScore project that investigates how digital technologies are reshaping music creation, performance and accessibility. Digital scores, defined as interactive interfaces for musical ideas, enable innovative compositional approaches, immersive performance experiences and inclusive practices. Drawing on nearly 50 case studies across five continents, the research highlights four key impacts: (1) enhanced interactivity and multimedia integration; (2) non-linear and real-time compositional methods; (3) novel performance opportunities in physical and virtual spaces; (4) broader accessibility for diverse musicians and audiences. An overview of case studies by the project’s partners and principal investigator illustrates how digital scores impact the creative practices of composers and performers, while also influencing audience engagement and fostering collaboration and participation. Despite challenges in balancing technological complexity with usability, the findings demonstrate how digital scores democratise music-making, offering new creative possibilities and redefining contemporary musical practices.

This article examines the work of the composer Michelle Lou through its affective and formal mechanisms. I propose that Lou’s work has consistently retained a fundamental and specific orientation towards the listener, which I describe as distance or proximity. In addressing three works spanning eight years – Opening (2008), untitled three-part construction (2014) and HoneyDripper (2016) – I show how the idea of distance informs and is articulated through orchestration, gestural and phrasal construction, scenography and form, and thus frames one’s experience of sound, spatiality, memory, time and perception. While the sounds and materials employed by Lou are often formally cold and sonically abrasive, I argue that her work ultimately implicates and invites the listener in as a crucial element of its sonic ecology, even enacting a sort of phenomenological care over the listener.

This article explores innovation in the chamber music that the internationally acclaimed composer Tan Dun (b. 1957) composed during the early 1980s, particularly his integration of traditional Chinese music elements with modern Western composition techniques. A detailed analysis of a representative selection of these early chamber music works focuses on Tan Dun’s pursuit of cultural symbols within a contemporary musical landscape. The findings highlight Tan Dun’s use of musical features such as microtones, aleatoric elements and special playing techniques to evoke traditional Chinese cultural traces in his compositions. The article also discusses his approach to polyphonic construction, which not only continues the horizontal melodic axis of Chinese music, but also creates rich vertical textures.

This article reflects upon the nature of ornamentation and how it applies within my recent works, Passacaglia (2021), Tor (2022), Fourteen transcriptions from across the plane (plain) (2023), and Through Gates Unseen (2023). I express ornamentation as a multifaceted set of activities which include the figurative, behavioural, layered and architectural. These components broadly move from the smallest sound unit to that of macro-level concerns. I argue that this behavioural aspect of ornamentation is exemplified by states of transition, density, kinetic energy, articulation and the organic. Here, ornamentation is used to distort and destabilise, as a vehicle for modulation, and as a framework for exploratory play between global and local-level details.

As intelligence technology advances, the boundaries between humans and machines blur, prompting questions regarding human identity and agency. While opera has traditionally explored such existential tensions, contemporary productions often emphasise technological narratives, potentially overshadowing human-centred perspectives. This article investigates music’s expressive potential to bridge these divergent viewpoints, positing it as a distinct form of ‘listening’ to and ‘knowing’ the world. Through a case study of Hao Weiya’s chamber opera AI Variation (2021), it probes how a musical approach communicates intricate ethical and existential questions posed by advancing AI technologies. The findings reveal that music’s non-linguistic nature creates an experiential space to explore, feel and contemplate human experiences. Orchestral voices craft sonic landscapes that invite contemplation on being and perception in an AI-driven world, and music conveys complexities beyond what words alone can express. The article illuminates how music contributes to a humanist response to technological advances, enriching cultural and philosophical discourse.

This re-evaluation of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is presented as a dialogue between its authors, conducted by email between July and October 2024. The dialogue takes as its starting point a consideration of the continuing relevance of Stockhausen’s music to music today, but begins by tracing the authors’ engagement with this music over the last five decades. The dialogue moves on to the discussion of a series of key aspects of Stockhausen’s work across his creative life, from Kreuzspiel to KLANG: the relationship between his electronic music and his compositional practice for acoustic instruments; form-schemes in his music and, in particular, the development of moment form; and his use of synthesisers. In conclusion, the authors assess Stockhausen’s influence on their own work and the extent of his significance for younger generations of musicians.

The letters sent by the English composer Michael Tippett from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where, a conscientious objector, he spent two months in summer 1943, form a remarkable and important sequence, illuminating not only Tippett's life and compositions but the experience of a gaoled objector to the Second World War. Four prison letters had been thought to survive, documenting in detail his imprisonment, which included turning pages for Benjamin Britten during a recital in the chapel, and conducting the prison orchestra. In 2023 a fifth letter was found, its discovery reported in the national press.1 Its publication is intended to complement the previously released documents, completing what is now a series of five until such time as a collected edition of Tippett's letters, of which only a fifth has seen print, can be undertaken.2

Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) is a pioneering Japanese artist, composer, and performer, known for her lifelong practice that crosses the boundaries between music, visual art, and performance, which has evolved fluidly across cultures, media, and technologies. She co-founded a leading postwar Japanese experimental music collective, Group Ongaku, and later joined Fluxus at the invitation of George Maciunas, which led her to spend a year in New York from 1964–65. This article presents 11 images from an extended interview with Shiomi, conducted by composers Chikako Morishita and Akiko Yamane during their visit to her home in Osaka in January 2020, as part of the filming of the documentary Shadow Piece. In the interview, Shiomi reflects on her childhood, education, career, and family life, and discusses the creation and reception of works such as Endless Box, Mirror Piece, and Spatial Poem. The conversation, originally in Japanese, was translated into English by Kiyo Kamisawa and the author.

This article presents a survey of the work of the Montreal-based ensemble Quatuor Bozzini (QB), in celebration of 25 years of the quartet’s activity, both as performers and as educators. Four composers – Christopher Butterfield, Christopher Fox, Bryn Harrison and Linda Catlin Smith – offer their reflections on working with QB, and the musicologist Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez focuses in particular on QB’s collaboration with Éliane Radigue on her OCCAM DELTA XV.