This article examines the music of composer Ann Cleare, focusing on representative works that display her use of microtonality, unconventional scoring, multimedia and extended techniques. It also discusses Cleare's connection to Irish language and poetry, environmentalism and visual art. Several chamber pieces are analysed. The article concludes with discussion of large-scale compositions, including the eyam cycle about the 1665 plague village in Derbyshire, England, and the forthcoming Brexit opera The Little Lives.

This article considers the recent music of the British composer Richard Emsley. It takes as a framework Tim Ingold's reflections on the creation of knowledge, not as the study of fixed objects but as a study with them, expressed in his 2013 book Making. The article examines the forces of resistance and opportunity that have shaped Emsley's creation of an algorithmic compositional method, and its use and adaptation in two groups of works: the series for piano (1997–) and the cycle Still/s (2002–19). The origins of for piano lie in a creative block that Emsley suffered between 1987 and 1996, during which time he began experimenting with using simple computer programs to create algorithmic compositions. Still/s extends this practice into a cycle of 24 pieces for instrumental quintet, originally inspired by a collaboration with the painter Joan Key. What emerges from both collections of pieces is not a form-based way of making but a practice, out of which forms might be discovered, and which requires skills of attentiveness, or what Ingold calls ‘correspondence’. The origins and subsequent elaborations of both for piano and Still/s show how the music itself has altered Emsley and his ways of working.

This article considers the implications of the consideration of epistemic justice within modes of composition pedagogy in higher education and is in part a manifesto, in part a reflection on my experiences of teaching composition in this setting. I ask how composition education can become, as described in 2015 by the North Macedonian dramatist and creative educator Goran Stefanovski, ‘the politics of the impossible’. I question how composition education could function without a canon of examples or assumed master–apprentice hierarchies and frame this as a question of epistemic justice, one that considers the composers themselves as individuals prior to the technical exercises that they may undertake. I describe why I believe that epistemic justice is a concept that is worthy of consideration in creative education in composition alongside the ways that current models of composition pedagogy might unintentionally cause students to experience epistemic injustice within their education experiences. Rather than a prescriptive model, I propose challenges that I hope can influence my educational approach now and in the future and conclude with some suggestions about what a model of hermeneutic epistemic justice might look like as a pedagogic model for music composition.

This article takes a recent interview with Chaya Czernowin, ‘5 Things Harvard's Chaya Czernowin Suggests You Do as an Aspiring Composer’, as a point of departure for a series of reflections on compositional pedagogy focusing specifically on inclusion. It proposes a less restrictive definition of a ‘composer’ and a decentring of career expectations in favour of embracing a range of creative sound-making practices. It goes on to underline the importance of transnational and transcultural perspectives, of experimentation and the risk of failure, and of listening skills that transcend style and culture. In these latter two sections, specific classroom techniques are cited: Maria Chavez's creative workshop on failure, and Thea Musgrave's ‘critique’ sessions, in which students listen critically to compositions without prior knowledge of their title or author. The final section addresses the question of evaluation, positing that lowering the stakes of individual assessments encourages students to branch out and take risks. It also calls into question the weight given to forms of evaluation, such as recommendation letters, that may pose particular problems of bias. In the conclusion, it looks to recent decolonisation movements in music for models of structural changes that could help to enact the essay's propositions.

Musical composition has traditionally been taught with the assumption that students share musical backgrounds and have similar aims. In today's highly diverse musical world, however, composition students are exposed to a multiplicity of musical languages. They develop their personal creative styles from an internal conceptual ‘melting pot’ and must also develop compositional methodologies for a potentially large array of disparate usages. This article argues that the teaching of composition should recognise both the rich global diversity of musics and the plethora of uses to which compositional techniques might be applied, and that such teaching might most productively be focused on imparting a broad selection of technical concepts from many musics, coupled with an interrogation of the underlying purposes of techniques taught. All musics must be treated as equally worthy of study and students’ embodied experiences respected. Curricula need to be designed with such a catholic view in mind, encouraging students to embrace the growing profusion of genres, techniques and resources available and develop a flexible, broadly informed and resourceful outlook.

The increasing precarity of arts academic jobs, combined with a much needed focus on equity and decolonisation, are de-privileging and destabilising the experimental music tradition and contemporary composer identity. As a result, composition departments are pursuing a paradox: scrambling to focus on specific marketable skills while also broadening the genres taught. After teaching in a composition department, a generalised arts department and a prison college programme, I describe methods to provide skills training for students interested in different genres, even if those genres are not the specialty of a department's faculty. These include: (1) discrete ‘levels’ of creative thought, from high-level questions of art's purpose to ground-level skills training; (2) creative process assignments, in which students plan and document their way through a prompt, developing a practical discipline into which desired skills can be incorporated; and (3) formal spaces for students to learn from each other, one-on-one, getting deeper into the similarities and differences they have. The goal is to empower students not simply via marketability, but by developing a sense of vocation without tethering creativity to employment, so that students may more realistically and more potently design their own lives in music.

In 2019 the present authors, along with our colleague Mic Spencer, began work on a project funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence, designed to look at the ways in which we taught composition at the University of Leeds and how we might change them. Mic has focused on postgraduate teaching, and we have considered the earliest parts of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly the first two years of study, when the largest numbers of students with the least experience of the study of composition at tertiary level might be in a classroom (50 or so, in our case).