1998 was a dramatic year for Ian Wilson. Already established as one of Ireland's leading young composers, that was the year he was elected to the exclusive Irish arts affiliation Aosdána (one of fewer than 20 musicians among its 200 members); his piano trio The Seven Last Words was included in the Northern Ireland A-level music syllabus (a rare ‘distinction’ for any living composer); he moved to Belgrade to be with his partner Danijela Kulezic; and his first son, Adam, was born.

Aaron Copland gave many interviews during his lifetime but the present conversation only came to light recently. On 19 and 20 October 1976 Aaron Copland visited the University of Keele. The evening of the 19th was devoted to a concert including his music in the Walter Moberly Hall, after which he answered questions in front of a large audience. The next morning he spoke informally to music students. Copland has discussed some of these issues before but each time he gives them a different slant which makes his responses worth preserving.

Arnold Schoenberg, of course, did not write a piano sonata. At any rate, none of his works for piano bears this title. As I have suggested elsewhere, however, sonata form was much in his thoughts as he wrote the piano pieces of opus 23, and one of his last two pieces for solo piano, written five years later, is a sonata movement which should stand as a model of the integration of twelve-note technique and classical form. When Pierre Boulez, in 1952, famously condemned Schoenberg for using the old forms instead of inventing new ones that were derived entirely from serialism, he might have taken just a moment to consider the ways in which the old form is articulated in opus 33a and been ever so slightly more charitable, for in this sonata movement, as in certain pieces of op. 23, themes and sections are defined and distinguished from each other in ways that have meaning only in relation to the twelve-note technique: though the form is an old one, the several parts are defined by reference to possibilities offered by the new method.

There is a school of thought in Britain which suggests that the rigours of modernist composition resulted in sterility and uniformity. Yet in the German-speaking world, composers have explored a wide range of expressive possibilities within a modernist sensibility. They have proved that the discipline of modernism is capable of stimulating genuine individuality, and over the past 30 years, Nicolaus A. Huber has emerged as one of the most distinctively radical, yet equally recognizable personalities on the German contemporary music scene. In contrast to Lachenmann, Rihm, or Höller, Huber has not attempted anything on the largest scale, but in the spheres of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music, he has produced a substantial body of work of considerable originality and dramatic power, frequently involving theatrical elements.

Readers of the January issue of Tempo may have come across an article of mine: the first of a series of articles by various writers on some general themes of interest to contemporary musicians. But the version you will have seen represents an early stage in the formative process of the piece. This unique snapshot of the author at work represents a first hurried response to a letter from David Johnson in the October 2002 Tempo before (somewhat provisional) emendations/extensions were made in order to create a (short) article.

Few contemporary operas achieve the newsworthiness of Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice. Even before its 7 December première at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the piece dented public consciousness thanks to a barrage of press coverage surrounding the production, the cast, and the subject matter. The irony is that it was the other names associated with the opera – conductor Simon Rattle, director Trevor Nunn, and William Styron, author of the 1979 novel – that made Sophie's Choice a news story, rather than the fame of its composer. Yet Maw's was the ultimate responsibility for the creation of this ambitious, large-scale work.

Kaija Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin – her first – was completed in 2000 and given its first production at the Salzburg Festival that year; it toured to Paris in late 2001 and to Santa Fe in 2002; it has also been staged in Darmstadt. Its concert presentation at the Barbican on 21 November was thus the first performance without the support of stage business – and, not having seen those earlier productions, one wonders how it can have been staged at all: the work is a drama-less, interiorized dreamscape-cum-ritual which proceeds in the imaginations of its symbolic characters. Those are the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye (baritone – on this occasion Gerald Finley), whose idealized love Clémence, Princess of Tripoli (soprano – Dawn Upshaw) lives at a (literally) respectable distance, at the other end of the Mediterranean; the go-between is a pilgrim (mezzo soprano – Beth Clayton); male and female choruses, deployed separately and only intermittently, represent the outside world, their matter-of-factness contrasting with the high-flown unrealism of the principals.

This year's BBC weekend at the Barbican dedicated to a single composer was given over to Mark-Anthony Turnage. Even Turnage himself expressed doubts initially about whether his music was diverse enough to withstand such exposure. His worries were unfounded, as the chance to explore his recent output, in particular, revealed a composer who is constantly growing in stature and breaking out in new and fruitful directions.

There is something of the poisoned chalice about setting the Belgian poet Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, Rondels Bergamasques – if nothing more than by association to the all-too-famous Schoenberg Sprechgesang melodrama. As interpreters of Giraud's work (and often as compositional interlopers), we are conditioned to assume that we ought not to bathe in the same water as Schoenberg. And yet the Yorkshire-based composer Roger Marsh has succeeded in (re)making Pierrot as a living resource with a tremendous staged production of Giraud's complete and enigmatic torrent of fantasy.

The world première of Dominic Muldowney's Second Piano Concerto on 7 November came as part of a concert marking the 80th birthday of the BBC. The work was fashioned for Angela Hewitt, who was accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin. Hewitt's core repertoire of Bach, Ravel and Messiaen was reflected in the style of Muldowney's new piece, which married Classical with neo-Classical idioms yet at the same time sounded thoroughly post-modern in its cheerful eclecticism, witty sidesteps and theatrical leaps of imagination.

Opus Anglicanum, a group of five unaccompanied male voices and a reader, are described by South West Arts as: ‘most thought provoking, very professional and exuding enthusiasm’. Having already premièred Judith Bingham's ‘necklace of light’ at York Minster two years ago (2000) and established it in their repertoire to such critical acclaim, the group commissioned a further work from the composer to be a focal point in their new themed programme for 2003, ‘Sacred Journey’.

There's a heartening number of contemporary music festivals in the former Soviet-bloc countries, and in the three Baltic republics in particular: it's as if, after decades of the suppression of modern music – even though less severe there than elsewhere in the USSR – they're all desperate to make up for lost time. The Gaida Festival, founded in 1991 and an annual event in Vilnius in mid-October, is one of the most ambitious: ten concerts in as many days, presenting contemporary Lithuanian composers, usually in first performances, in conjunction with others from further afield (among them this year Saariaho, Tan Dun, Cage, Jan Sandström – with Christian Lindberg astride the ubiquitous Motorbike Concerto – and Gubaidulina). Naturally, such occasions are ragbags, with failures among the successes – but young composers have to be able to hear their miscalculations, and Gaida is commendably generous with its time.

The final round of the second ‘Inscape’ competition, brainchild of violinist Adam Summerhayes, took place in the Purcell Room on 27 November 2002. The award structure is three-fold: a jury prize, deliberated over several months from the preliminary entry phase through to the final award; a critics' prize, decided on the night by a panel of four critics who had had access to the seven finalist pieces a week or so beforehand; and an audience prize, made up of an exit poll after the seven finalists had each been played.