A performer of Luigi Nono's late works is often faced with crucial questions regarding interpretation and technical details. An important tradition has evolved in performing these works, nevertheless it is not always easy to find the necessary information to play them adequately. This article attempts to answer some of the technical and interpretational questions in the context of Das atmende Klarsein and A Pierre – Dell'Azzurro silenzio, inquietum. Our hope is that it will contribute to the discussion about authenticity and freedom of interpretation and provide flutists with practical information not found in the scores.

Compared to the central figures of French spectral music, Horaţiu Rădulescu has received relatively little critical attention. Contrasting temperaments, writing styles and surface musical features have led to a tendency to place Rădulescu in opposition to Grisey in particular. In this article I analyse some of Rădulescu's theoretical writing and demonstrate important shared values with the spectral ‘mainstream’. I then examine Das Andere for solo viola, Op. 49 (1983) in detail and compare it to Grisey's solo viola masterpiece, Prologue (1976). In so doing I hope not only to reveal the inner workings of one of Rădulescu's most compelling and approachable pieces, but also to show some common strategies with Grisey, regardless of their radically different aural results.

This edited transcript of a conversation with composer Monty Adkins explores a wide range of topics: the fundamental aspects of Adkins’ compositional aesthetic, the history and development of his practice, musical influences, considerations of beauty, narrative vs. abstract approaches to composition, types of listening, perceptions of time, notions of the sacred, the imposition (and benefits) of compositional restrictions, the organisation/structuring of non-teleological music, combining electronics with live instruments, and Adkins’ relationship with the listener. The conversation took place on 24 February 2017 at the University of Huddersfield, during the annual Electric Spring festival. Audio of the complete, three-hour conversation can be downloaded and streamed at http://5against4.com/2017/04/18/the-dialogues-monty-adkins/.

In this article I argue that it seems to be an inherent quality of the opera medium that it maintain an active and creative approach to all aspects of stage art and that these can and should be part of the composition since their relation to music is no less obvious than that of text to music. I examine the equivalence of speech and song, the equivalence of opera and theatre in general, the relative status of text and other aspects of the form, the relative status of formal development and melody, the equivalence of stage character and form, and the abstract nature of the concept of plot.

This article consists of a collection of some of the tweets published on the @composeradvice twitter feed (www.twitter.com/composeradvice) between May 2016 and January 2018. The feed was designed to give advice to composers of experimental music.

This article offers generalised reflections on current aesthetic interests and values within the field of new music. Critical composition and postmodernism are considered for the relevance these historic positions might hold today. Then two important trends of the past decade are presented: first, music that draws attention toward the sounding shape and act of listening, reflecting the recent surge of interest in materialism across academic and artistic disciplines; and second, pieces that include aspects such as physical action, lighting and theatrical approaches to expand the possibilities of concert hall work beyond the purely sonic.

Time through history can be marked by the passing of generations. Archeological sites reveal the intimate secrets of our ancient ancestors through thousands of pieces of broken pottery recovered from the ground. Piecing together these shards can be likened to reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle, one of long forgotten civilisations, places, memories and stories.

For the moment, ignore the information above. David Helbich didn't perform his No Music – Earpieces at Café Oto on Saturday 13 January. I did, a few weeks later, on a Suffolk beach. If you don't count the seagulls, I had an audience of one.

Does intimacy have anything to do with music? Music – especially acoustic chamber music – is regularly, even unthinkingly, labelled intimate. The implications of this common-enough usage were the major preoccupation of the most recent London Contemporary Music Festival. With multiple images and varieties of intimacy foregrounded – bodily, sexual, aural, psychological, somnolent – Igor Toronyi Lalic's curation was masterful. By turns provocative, baffling, emotional and ear-averting, not without some irony, the concerts were held in a vast underground concrete room.

In an industry where the brand new and the first performance are fixated upon, Ultraschall Berlin is to be applauded for being less interested in presenting a glut of premieres than in cultivating a twenty-first-century tradition. At this year's festival, its twentieth edition, only a quarter of the 69 works performed were world premieres, with just four of them commissioned by the two organisations presenting the festival, state broadcasters rbb and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

The audience sits blindfolded in concentric circles, facing away from the performer. Refusing any visual accompaniment, and presenting sounds from his vast archive of field recordings without context or explicit identification, field recordist and sound artist Francisco Lopez asks the audience to wear these blindfolds to remove any distraction, and encourages them towards an intense focus on the sonic material he is about to present. Lopez describes the blindfolds as a ‘voluntary commitment to listening’. He believes that sounds are ‘things’, physical entities that have character(s) and substance. What follows is a bewildering array of material: rural, urban, animal, elemental.