This is the last issue of TEMPO to be published by Cambridge University Press, closing the most recent chapter in the journal’s 85-year history, so perhaps it is appropriate that many of the articles in this issue are haunted by the past. But in January we will begin a new chapter, with the publication of the first issue of the journal from its new home at Wolke Verlag, so it is equally appropriate that the articles published here demonstrate how the past can also trigger innovation.

We start with Assaf Shelleg’s article on Arik Shapira’s opera, Aqedah. Immediately we are in a space, haunted and defined by the patriarch Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac, ancient stories from the Book of Genesis whose ramifications continue to be bloodily contested, and Shapira’s work is so controversial that it has never been staged. Shelleg’s books, from Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (2014) to The State of Afterness: Contemporary Music in and about Israel (2025), mark him out as one of the most significant musicologists of the last decade and we are delighted that he has chosen to publish his new article with us.

Michael Zev Gordon’s recent work A Kind of Haunting, which Rishin Singh categories as ‘a hybrid, between musical melodrama and cantata,’ has an obvious connection to Shapira’s opera. Gordon’s work is haunted by his grandfather, Zalman, murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust but, as Singh explains, Zalman haunts the music not so much as a memory but as a ‘postmemory,’ a concept defined by Marianne Hirsch as ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before.’

Ying Wang offers another approach to memory, considering the way in which Tan Dun’s chamber music of the 1980s deliberately evoked elements of traditional Chinese culture. It was Tan Dun’s imaginative combination of these elements – represented by Chinese instruments and by the melodic contours, textures and rhythms of Chinese folk music – with aspects of Western avant-garde music that established his reputation, both within China and, more significantly for his subsequent career, in the USA. He is probably best known for his score for Ang Lee’s film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and it is good to be reminded of the beautiful and innovative early works that first captured the attention of an international audience. Jakob Bragg’s music also has its roots in older music but the associations here are less specific, ranging historically from François Couperin to Liza Lim and culturally from Ottoman to Celtic music. In each case it is, as Bragg writes, the relationship between ‘the use of figures and activity that could be described as ornamentation’ and ‘the development and identity’ of individual pieces of music that has in turn informed his own music.

Regular readers of TEMPO will know that the final pages of an issue are often given over to a profile interview, but in this issue Chikako Morishita’s interview with Mieko Shiomi has developed into something rather more substantial, tracing the entire life of one of the leading figures of the Fluxus movement. It has been an extraordinary life. As a child Shiomi lived through the American bombing of Japan in the Second World War, as a teenager and adult she combined artistic adventures with the restrictive societal conventions that governed women’s lives in Japan, and yet she has made work whose generosity of spirit is exemplary.

A similar generosity of spirit characterises the work of Canadian string quartet, Quatuor Bozzini. The history of new music, as well as its future, is as dependent on the work of performers as on composers and for 25 years the Bozzinis have been devoted not only to commissioning, performing, and recording new works but also to providing student and emerging composers with workshop opportunities, so that they too can discover what it is like to work with live musicians. In ‘QB rhymes with passion’ some of the Bozzinis’ collaborators explain what it is about their work that makes it so important.

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As I said at the start of this editorial, this issue of TEMPO is the last to be published by Cambridge University Press, the end of an association that began in January 2003. The Press has been a great supporter of the journal ever since TEMPO joined its extensive list of academic periodicals, although we have probably been rather less ‘academic’ than anything else they publish. Nevertheless, they put up with our devotion to topicality, with the fact that many of our writers are deeply engaged in the world of new music rather than being entirely neutral observers and with our peculiar version of peer review. They have also promoted the journal to a global readership and, on behalf of TEMPO’s writers and readers I would like to thank all the many people at the Press who have contributed to the success of the Cambridge phase of TEMPO’s existence.

The process of transition to Wolke Verlag has already begun and the January 2026 issue will initiate the new era. Based in Berlin, Wolke Verlag has an impressive portfolio that includes an extensive catalogue of books on all aspects of new music, as well as the journal Positionen. They are ideal partners for TEMPO and our discussions suggest that the journal’s future is secure. Our editorial policy, established over many years and given a new focus in the most recent decade, will not change, but we want to foster an even closer relationship with new music communities around the world and to develop new ways of presenting our work alongside the quarterly publication, in print and on-line, of the journal. We hope you too will be part of the journal’s future.