This article explores the times and datedness of new opera. When referring to an opera (20**) the bracketed number that follows the composition title usually refers to the date of composition or the first performance. When asked how many times an opera was played, its interpreters tend to refer to the number of performances, not the number of instances of rehearsal and individual practice. These times often remain unmentioned by performers, composers, production teams and institutions. But what do we make invisible when we exclude the main act of collective labour in the production of a new staged work? How do new operas structure their times and, in turn, how do these various times restructure new opera? I call for an inclusion of the rehearsal in the temporal narratives that new opera tells through its dates and times, emerging from collaborative processes in compound temporalities. With ethnographic glimpses into different operatic rehearsal studios, I examine the process that takes up most of new opera's time – rehearsal time – rather than audiences’ or performers’ lived experiences during the performance. This article maps the times inside rehearsal time – from daily schedules, call times and deep times of props to computational time and the timing of time itself – for better understanding new opera's ontology.

Gerald Barry's approach to composition has undergone a number of changes. Frequently these developments coincide with the composition of a large-scale opera. One of these points of transition in his output occurs in the period before he commenced work on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Between 1999 and 2000 Barry composed three works – 1998, The Eternal Recurrence and Wiener Blut – in which he attempted to find a new compositional direction after a period in which canonic proliferation dominated his musical material. This article examines some of the main traits of these works, and Wiener Blut in particular, since it contains a greater variety of approaches than the other two compositions. The article also considers how Barry's shift in approach may have been linked to his decision to set Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play. Its quite plain, realistic prose was a contrast to the sort of text Barry had previously chosen to set, requiring a different musical response, and the article draws out some possible connections between Barry's three ‘pointillistic’ compositions and the opera.

Some musics and musical situations seem to invite the audience to participate; others insist that the audience should absorb the events of performance in rapt attention. A slippage between such distinctions can also arise: a moment where an audience might be uncertain as to whether joining in is desired or welcome. In an examination of such a moment of uncertainty or surprise, at the close of Raymond MacDonald's Stolen in a Dreamland Heist (2021), we suggest that such events point towards and perform the particular creative spaces and spacing effects that arise in musical events in ways which draw attention to the affective bodily relationships between performers and auditors. The article takes the form of its own nested dialogue: an interview with the composer forms its central portion, framed within theoretical examination both of that critical moment within performance and the reflections on it the interview reveals.

The natural world is a frequent touchstone for the Swiss-born Austrian composer Beat Furrer. In the operatic work Violetter Schnee (2019), for instance, images of snow and coldness take on a central role. Other works, such as Wüstenbuch (2009) and the Spazio Immergente triptych (2015), refer more indirectly to notions of barren landscapes and ecological excess. At the basis of all these works are sentiments of slippage and loss, of far-reaching melancholia and an unrepairable detachment from reality. The composer's multi-layered use of repetition further underlines these sentiments and aids in the creation of constantly shifting sonic landscapes. This article argues that the recurrent use of nature imagery in Furrer's work signposts a latent ecological dimension in his oeuvre. In doing so, the article focuses on the slipperiness of musical repetition, and more particularly on the heavily destabilising power of the loop. Taking Violetter Schnee as the starting point for inquiry, and using Timothy Morton's philosophical project of ‘dark ecology’ as a heuristic framework, the article reads Furrer's recent work against the background of ecological critique.

This article focuses on three of Beat Furrer's works described as opera or music theatre: Begehren (2001), FAMA (2005) and Wüstenbuch (2010). Each of these pieces sets texts from Roman, contemporary and historical authors in exploration of the liminal spaces between life and death, and the possible transitions between them. In Wüstenbuch one such text is included from the Papyrus Berlin 3024, known as the source of the Ancient Egyptian philosophical text ‘The Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, a reflection on the meaning and value of life and the transition between life and death. Furrer's compositional style does not offer a linear narrative on such questions but rather multiple perspectives and tableaux, each of which calls the others and itself into question. In order to explore this and understand what the meeting and interchange of the different texts and authors offers within the context of Furrer's music, I outline a method of ‘listening intertextually’ in order to hear the liminal spaces not only within but between these compositions. I consider the hybrid and hypertexts that arise within the music, and the ways that they can be therefore considered – as in the subtitle often given to FAMA – a ‘drama of listening’.

In February 2011 the Brunel Sound Series hosted Phill Niblock at Brunel University London, a memorable visit expertly orchestrated by our late colleague Bob Gilmore.1 The occasion featured Phill's Disseminate and the premiere of his TWO LIPS aka Nameless, led by Bob. As an amateur clarinet player, in an ensemble made up of Brunel staff and students, I had the privilege of delving into the intricacies of Niblock's compositions. The event marked a significant chapter in our music department's history, with performances at Brunel University and, a day later, at London's trendiest club for hip contemporary music, Cafe OTO, in Dalston, leaving an indelible imprint on our students’ musical journey, and not just theirs.2

This article presents an exomusicologically informed response to the theme of alienation through encounter in Oli Jan's Three Singers on Planet M, in which actors execute apparently ritualistic sounds and actions. Their activities signal aesthetic intentionality but do so through an unfamiliar cultural display that defies the rules of our own lived experience of embodiment and environment. The conceit sets up an interesting question related to the somatic imaginary: how can and how do we relate to the imagination of non-human bodies?

Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

Seaton Snook was a thriving community of fishermen, blacksmiths, teachers, seacoalers, labourers and musicians on the coast of County Durham, UK. After 1968, however, government records and newspaper reports referring to the town cease and there are, apparently, no former residents still living. This article outlines the creation of What Happened to Seaton Snook?, an internet-based archive of sounds and music from the area, its residents and its workers, devised to try and form a picture of the town and what happened there. Among the nearly 100 artefacts in this ethnomusicological study are pieces for piano and harpsichord, pedagogic works, folk tunes for voice and Northumbrian smallpipes, brass band music, Krautrock, psychedelic rock and works for magnetic tape. There are biographies and photographs of people key to the history of the town, and interviews with experts in matters pertaining to the artefacts. The archive also seeks to examine the economic and cultural neglect of the North East of England and the importance of the stories we tell around the music we make.

Björn Heile's 3 × 10 Musical Actions for Three Socially Distanced Performers features frequent changes in musical material, playing style and instrumental combinations. Throughout a series of short sections, the performers play, sing, speak, conduct and move around, following instructions that appear on tablets. This article reflects on audiences’ experiences of the work and on musical actions more generally. We consider musical actions as short, coherent motion chunks and distinguish between several types of action that appear in the piece: gestures (communicative actions, with or without sound), reactions (where a player responds to another) and interactions (where players mutually coordinate). The musicians’ individual and collective actions create a sense of play: on the one hand, they seem free and depart from standard concert conventions; on the other hand, they seem to be following a set of rules, even if these rules are not explained to the audience. As such, we approach the piece via theories of play and relate it to earlier modernist musical games. Ultimately, 3 × 10 Musical Actions emphasises several aspects of musical actions, as social, functional, expressive, playful and embodied.

Quarter-tones have the dubious honour of being the microtonal default in Western art music, yet they have been of little recent interest to those most involved with extended intonation. Other microtonal equal divisions have appealed as pragmatic approximations of consonant just-intonation intervals, something that quarter-tones do not offer. This article proposes that quarter-tones can be valued in a different way, for their ability to generate symmetrical harmonic resources that divide the fourth and fifth as the tritone does the octave. These resources are offered as examples of a broader aesthetic of symmetry, which is contrasted with an aesthetic of proportion. These antagonistic principles are explored through the case of the ever problematic tritone, illustrating how proportion and symmetry are best understood using the symbolic resources of just intonation and equal temperament respectively. Drawing on the work of Robert Hasegawa, Georg Friedrich Haas and Ivan Wyschnegradsky, the article argues for a hybrid approach that embraces both just intonation and equal temperament.

Between 1967 and 1988 Maryanne Amacher's City-Links series comprised radio broadcasts, sound installations and interdisciplinary performances featuring her practice of mixing sonic material from multiple remote locations joined via telecommunications infrastructure. These works reflect Amacher's compositional elevation of the process of sonic perception alongside musical material, an approach that would evolve to inform her later work in which she dealt with the musical potential of psychoacoustic phenomena known as auditory distortion products. This article aims to provide an overview of the City-Links series as a unique product of the experimentation in post-war avant-garde music and visual and conceptual art. After a synopsis of Amacher's early compositional development, I offer a comparison between Amacher's City-Links and John Cage's radio works, exploring different contemporary approaches to transmission and broadcast as a compositional medium. I then situate the site-specificity of the City-Links works within the extramusical frame offered by Amacher's contemporary Robert Smithson's site/non-site dialectic. The article finally suggests the necessity for a more holistic examination of Amacher's legacy that accounts for both the musicological and art-historical implications of her work.

This article defines and explores the concept of ‘resistance’ as a source of musical meaning in performance. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ as a framework, I examine my musical habitus: the embodied, internalised ways I play my instrument and think about music, which reflect my extensive musical histories and the fields in which these histories have taken place. Resistance arises in practice when this habitus is undermined. When the types of musicking undertaken circumvent my habituated understanding of acceptable performance and performative roles, it manifests as a pull towards more familiar modes of musical engagement. Making specific reference to resistance experienced in the development and performance of Alex Harker's Drift Shadow (2021), for solo oboe and electronics, the article outlines the ways in which my subjective relationship to my instrument and my role as a performer produce particular understandings of a work that can then nuance the way I play the piece.

This article presents the theoretical foundations of speculative archaeoacoustics, a methodology of composition in which artistic practice becomes a way of accessing the lost music of the Upper Palaeolithic. It begins by accepting David Graeber and David Wengrow’s understanding of prehistory as a dazzling tapestry of investigations and enquiries, before drawing a methodology of affect and creation from the work of Steven Mithen. From here it critiques two contemporary procedures for realising ancient music – one theoretical and one practical – to show how lost art must be reclaimed not through the empirical limit but the aesthetic exception. By adapting Alain Badiou's theory of eternal, invariant truths through a satirical tradition that includes science- and theory-fiction, the argument concludes with the demonstration of a procedure through which we may reimagine, discover and speak for vanished genius.

This article proposes a series of connections between the consumption of resources, the creation of new music and ideas about sustainability. A number of examples is discussed, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, that illustrate the ways in which conspicuous, and often ethically questionable, consumption has been a signifier for innovation in new music. The article concludes by introducing three of the author's recent works, The calm of mountains, This has happened before and Hieroglyph, as models of a compositional practice that attempts to enact and embody ideas of sustainability.