This article seeks to clarify the aesthetic precedents for New Conceptualism generally, and Johannes Kreidler's work in particular. Pursuant to this end, I examine how Kreidler's approaches to musical and political material are ideologically indebted to his teacher, Mathias Spahlinger, whose dictum that New Music can be socially relevant without resorting to political clichés is taken by Kreidler into the digital age. Finally, by means of a conclusion, I attempt to provide a broad examination of how Kreidler's aesthetic concerns differ from – and sometimes radically conflict with – those other composers who are grouped under the New Conceptualism letterhead.

One important stimulus in attempting to apply Adorno's constellation of concepts on performance to Brian Ferneyhough's guitar music is that both display the influence of Walter Benjamin's thought. Benjamin's concept of mimesis influenced Adorno's theory of musical reproduction, however much Adorno may have reformulated it, and various Benjaminian topics are traceable in Ferneyhough's guitar music, especially Kurze Schatten II (1983–89) for solo guitar. Adorno claims that true reproduction is the X-ray image of the work of music, a rendition of all the aspects that lie hidden beneath the surface. By exploring the conceptual traces of Benjamin's thought in Kurze Schatten II, this article examines how performer's interpretative choices are likely to render the X-ray image of this music in performance, as seen through a gesture-based approach.

This edited transcript of a public pre-concert discussion with composer, theorist and critic Benjamin Boretz not only touches on early personal encounters with Babbitt but also ranges over issues of reception of his music, listening experiences, transformations of music's temporality, connections to Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and postmodernism, stylistic changes over Babbitt's career and composerly poetics, as well as motivations and consequences for precompositional structures and systems. The discussion took place on 22 November 2015, at the first of three recitals during the 2015–16 concert season at Spectrum, in New York City, in which Augustus Arnone for the second time performed all of Milton Babbitt's solo piano works, this time in honour of the composer's centenary.

To distinguish differences of harmony, to compose music so that players and listeners may sense these variations naturally, in real time, the representation of harmonic space in musical notation must be precise yet simple to read. Shadings of intonation are most clearly conceived in relation to consonant, untempered intervals. Intervals derived from a common frame of reference may be represented by microtonal signs, which suggest potentially tuneable intervallic relationships.

In the last few months of his life, Bob Gilmore embarked on another major project: that of writing a book about my work. He pressed me to try to define what I meant by non-conceptual composition and composition as an art form. This is a condensation of some of the topics we talked about for many hours.

Of the conversations I had with Bob Gilmore when he was a Dartington College lecturer and lived in Totnes, five minutes from where I live, there was one in particular that we returned to a few times. And it concerned the way the burgeoning American folk movement from the 1920s through to the 50s interacted with experimentalism in music, perhaps surprisingly, yet in some significant ways.

Today I know what I want to say, but on the other hand I am a little uncertain about how to approach it because some of the material is, shall we say, ‘delicate’. So excuse me for using Bob Gilmore as a way in, a role I think he would have relished.

A short paper hardly stands in need of an epigraph, but I'm going to give mine one all the same. Here, then, are four lines, a quatrain, using every letter in the alphabet except for the loss of B, O, G, I, L, M, R and E.

The solo exhibition ‘Week’ was conceived for the sky-lit gallery on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle Basel in 2012. At the very centre of the gallery space a mono-block of loudspeakers was playing 7, a visual representation of which was notated for the brochure of the exhibition. 7 is constructed from two versions of an acoustic bass drum sample, which acts as a minimal ‘audio-diagram’ representing the ever-repeating cycle of the seven days of the week. The piece was constructed using a scale of 1:86400 (24 hours × 60 minutes × 60 seconds); in other words, a second refers to a day in ‘real time’. The bass drum sample sounds on each second, creating a steady beat with a tempo of 60 bpm which, for some visitors, is a direct reminder of certain types of electronic dance music. On top of the beat, a computer-generated voice recites the days of the week in English, one day per second. Occasionally, the voice switches to counting the days without specific names: ‘day, day, day … ’. The audio piece used the vocabulary and acoustic characteristics of minimal electronic music in order to represent a temporal unit, by using the means of time itself, whilst the visual representation (notation) was used as an aid to describe the simple idea behind the sonic counterpart.

‘How do you deal with endings?’, Stephen Newbould, BCMG's Artistic Director, asked a group of four composers in an interview prior to the ensemble's final concert of the season, given on 12 June. Perhaps Newbould was thinking out loud: ‘Remembering the Future’ marked his and Executive Producer Jackie Newbould's last event with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, after a tenure of nearly 30 years. The CBSO Centre was packed to the rafters for this concert that featured new commissions by Luke Bedford, Richard Baker, John Woolrich and Zoë Martlew: four composers with strong connections to the group. At the suggestion of John Woolrich, in his role as Artist-in-Association with BCMG, the works were scored not for BCMG's usual larger forces but for Schoenberg's ‘Pierrot’ ensemble, with various additions and subtractions.

Despite the ever-dwindling pot of public money available to exploratory musicians in the UK and elsewhere, various ensembles are nonetheless busy making hay whilst at least a little sun still shines. In London in the space of only a week or two in the second half of April, for instance, audiences could catch a series of new music recitals given by the Park Lane Group of young musicians, an evening of premieres with the Workers’ Union Ensemble, and concerts by the Riot Ensemble and by the London Contemporary Orchestra Soloists. Other cities, from Glasgow to Birmingham, enjoy a similarly wide range of activity.

The Spire, St Mark's chapel, is an artist-led creation space in Brighton. Normally it's a blank space without heating or equipment but for the night of 10 May it is fantastically dressed up with lights, pictures and a projection saying ‘landmark post-classical recordings’. This is a label showcase for 130701, an offshoot of FatCat Records set up by Dave Howell in 2001. Hauschka, one of the label's longstanding artists who has opened up his imaginative and playful inside-piano playing to commercial audiences, and the label's willingness to support live experimental music are the reasons I'm here.

Is there any London concert venue more suited to the music of Christian Wolff than Café Oto? It's not so much its status as the nexus of hipster lounge and ascetic experimentalism as its noisiness. No sooner had violinist Aisha Orazbayeva and pianist Joseph Houston begun to play Wolff's indeterminate classic For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964) than I was reminded of John Cage:

As the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence of the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Philip Venables has – some might say bravely – chosen to adapt 4.48 Psychosis, the last play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane. Brave for several reasons. Kane's work is renowned for its naked, sometimes brutal, expression and themes, and the nihilism and violence of her plays have caused critical uproar in the past. Moreover, her estate has until now been understandably protective of her legacy; Venables's opera, premiered in May, is the first adaptation they have permitted, and came with instructions to remain as true as possible to the text.

It wouldn't be the worst idea if Anthony Braxton's Composition No. 58 were used to kick off every music festival. In any event, it's hard to think of a fanfare more fitting for the common fan, whether of classical, jazz or experimental rock. It could, for example, quite easily be followed by a piece of Mauricio Kagel's instrumental theatre or a parade by the Sun Ra Arkestra or the precisely played experimental excursions of the Brooklyn avant-rock outfit Zs.

Halfway through Stefan Prins's Mirror Box Extensions (2015) a guy next to me stretches out his arms to hold up an iPad. I've noticed his fiddling with the gadget throughout the performance, lacking the courage to tell him just how distracting it is. As other iPads emerge in the crowd, all of them making noises and projecting tiny details from the stage, I realize I've been tricked. I never figured he was simply following Prins's instructions and was actually participating in this work that focuses on blurring the borders between the virtual and the real.