This article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

Martin Arnold is an experimental composer currently residing in Toronto, Canada. His unique approach to composition originates in the close relationship that he developed with Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous while Arnold was a doctoral student at the University of Victoria. Martin Arnold's desire to create music both familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, generates paradoxical listening experiences that reside on the edges of things. In this article, the author explores a number of these edges and meeting places, especially as they occur within the composer's very singular string quartet, Contact; Vault.

This analysis of Helmut Lachenmann's Salut für Caudwell (1977) for guitar duet is intended to add to the small amount of English literature that directly examines Lachenmann's music. A description of Salut's construction is offered, decrypting the extended techniques employed and outlining the work's formal design. The concept of ‘musical ruins’, namely degenerative yet familiar material, is deployed as a means to discuss specific moments of the music, and it will be demonstrated that moments of ‘musical ruin’ are inherently linked to aspects of instrumental technique as well as the musical form, making them critical to the reception of Salut. Other analyses of Lachenmann's work are used as methodological models and comparisons, providing a framework within which to examine unfamiliar musical territory, and placing Salut within the repertory of Lachenmann's more thoroughly documented music.

The music of John Adams has grown far away from its roots in Minimalism, but even in complex works like American Berserk (2001) and the Saxophone Concerto (2013) one can detect the working of a compositional mind conditioned by procedures relating back to earlier periods of the composer's output. A feature of Adams recent work is a continuing concern with various repetition strategies but in a far more veiled and multilayered manner. Another feature of both works is the deployment of ‘pushing up’ and ‘pushing down’ material manipulated rhythmically and raised to a structural level. Two strategies are adopted and adapted to investigate these features. The first, is from Rebecca Leydon's ‘Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes’, which considers the qualities of repetition in Minimal music, and the second is an idea borrowed from David Osmond Smith's monograph on Berio's Sinfonia, Playing on Words, where he considers ‘levels of obliteration’ of an underlying text (Mahler 2 Scherzo ‘In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung’) in the third movement of the Sinfonia.

This article discusses how normative perceptions of British contemporary orchestral music can be underpinned by a residual binary of ‘clarity’ versus ‘complexity’ as positive and negative value judgements respectively, informing public discourse around the orchestra by reviewers, audiences and performers alike. A post-war valorisation of ‘clarity’ is traceable to the transparent neo-tonal harmony, melodic invention and approaches to orchestration characteristic of the post-Britten tradition. The adoption of such a valorisation by ‘mainstream’ contemporary British composers, exemplified by Faber Music, has generalised an aesthetically specific compositional approach. Using the examples of Thomas Adès and George Benjamin, the article shows how certain residual normative approaches to material and notation are defined against the tendencies of ‘complexism’ as exemplified by Brian Ferneyhough. This binary has engendered conservatism towards traditions of radical new orchestral music that do not conform to normative expectations of ‘clarity’, as the immediately perceptible separation and identification of musical elements.

Located on the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, Sonorama is an audio work that offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train, downloadable as an App for listening with headphones.

It seems impossible at first to review multiple nights of the London Contemporary Music Festival all at once – over the course of a week the cavernous Ambika P3 gallery hosted a sensory overload of music that, while not always new, was certainly contemporary in the atypical thematic presentations, bringing together provocative works in provocative ways. Running from 11 to 17 December, the three middle nights of LCMF all dealt with the monumental: large, long works that opened up audience perceptions by virtue of extended contemplation. The concerts on Sunday and Tuesday lasted over three hours; they weren't easy, but they prompted salient experiences.

The London Ear Festival is a small contemporary chamber music festival in London, now in its fourth edition. The festival is centred on the venues of the Cello Factory (its festival hub) and the Warehouse, near Waterloo. Despite its centrality and accessibility, the festival maintains a community and village feel: a sort of musical oasis. This year's festival, running 9–13 March, was timetabled against a number of other notable concerts in London – not least those celebrating Michael Finnissy's seventieth year – and so can be commended on its ability to draw audiences despite this clash, suggesting, perhaps, that it is genuinely offering something musically different and desirable.

In what would become known as the Notenkrakersactie, a group of composers, Louis Andriessen amongst them, famously disrupted a Concertgebouw Orchestra concert in 1969, protesting its Establishment politics and unwillingness to engage with the younger generation of Dutch firebrands. Nearly half a century later, Andriessen is a recipient not only of commissions from said orchestra but also of what is arguably the most prestigious (and certainly the most lucrative) composition prize in the world, the Grawemeyer Award. There is no great irony here, of course – music history is littered with examples of iconoclasts whose originality disoriented contemporary opinion, not to mention angry young men whose radicalism mellowed with age – but the case of Andriessen is certainly striking.

History offers us many examples of successful collaborations between librettists and composers (the Da Ponte–Mozart, Boito–Verdi, Hofmannsthal–Strauss pairings, to name just a few), and novelist Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae's new opera, The Devil Inside, offers further evidence that equal partnerships between creative contributors in an opera can yield impressive results. The Devil Inside is the pair's third collaborative venture, and their second co-commission from Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales; further continuity comes in the form of their creative team – director Matthew Richardson, conductor Michael Rafferty, set and costume designer Samal Blak and lighting designer Ace McCarron, all familiar from their previous opera, Ghost Patrol – resulting in a noticeable synergy of music, drama and language in this production worthy of a wide audience.

‘Old mythologies’ have been important for some time to Anna Clyne, and they come into play again in two of her most recent works: the violin concerto The Seamstress and her brief Auden setting, This Lunar Beauty, for soprano and ensemble. The young British composer (b. 1980) has for many years been a resident of New York; she studied with Julia Wolfe in Manhattan and since 2010 has been the composer in association with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Gentrification, spiralling rent, economic inequality, traffic chaos – the people of London have come to dread what ‘change’ entails. However, I'm convinced that some things have changed for the better: today's ‘new music scene’ (which I identify as that populated by composers and performers of notated contemporary music, creative improvisers, their concerts, networks and ideas) is radiating a vibrancy that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago. I want to celebrate it.

A ‘Festival für Zeitfragen’, a ‘festival for questions about time’, has been the motto for MaerzMusik since Berno Odo Polzer became its artistic director one year ago. In a way, the topic is rather self-evident, which might lead to a thematic flat-out – music in general is about, amongst other things, time – but the ambitions are high. Since the 2015 edition, there has been a seminar series running parallel to the concerts, which has the aim of deepening our understanding and thoughts about time, from cultural, artistic, political and scientific points of view. And sometimes it did. Sometimes it even managed to provide perspectives on what was happening, musically, at MaerzMusik.

From 10 to 20 March 2016, Geneva was transformed into a giant musical playground of sorts: the title of this year's Archipel Festival was ‘Aires de jeux’. Over its 24 editions, the festival has been a showcase for musical creation and has promoted not contemporary music in a broad sense, but rather the music of our time. In a recent interview, the current festival director, Marc Texier, noted that a common misunderstanding is to ‘consider contemporary music as beginning in the post-war period, 70 years ago. That's quite extraordinary! The music of 1945 doesn't have much in common with what is created today. For today's composers, works from 1945 belong to their grandparents or great-grandparent's generations’.

Only the Sound Remains consists of two stories of supernatural encounters. A monk, praying for the soul of a deceased general, meets the latter's ghost, attracted by the sounds of the lute used in the monk's ritual. A fisherman finds the feather mantle belonging to a Tennin, an angelic spirit, who pleads with him to return the item, which he only does after she performs a celestial dance; thus, the chorus tells us, ‘was the dance of pleasure, Suruga dancing, brought to the sacred east’. Both encounters are evanescent: the ghost of the general is visited by memories of terrible battles and disappears back into the spirit world; the Tennin's dance is an announcement of spring, as the Tennin herself disperses into the mists that obscure mount Fuji. In both stories, the spiritual is a manifestation of something virtual, relating artistic forms to worlds not of, yet touching on, the everyday. The sounds of the lute, which used to belong to the general, are a conduit to deep memory; the dance taught by the Tennin connects humans to the inhuman workings of nature.

The winter solstice has long held deep significance for cultures dating back to as far as the Neolithic period. Some of civilisation's oldest monuments, from Stonehenge to Newgrange, are carefully aligned on sight lines pointing toward the winter solstice sunrise and sunset. And it's no surprise for the day marked the middle of winter, giving early man a crucial indicator – a signpost that guided food consumption for the remaining winter months – but on an even deeper level, the winter solstice signified for ancient pagan peoples the beginning of a rebirth, marking the resurrection of a beloved sun god and the gradual reawakening of nature.