Hans Abrahamsen and Paul Griffith's let me tell you has been received with unusual adulation since its premiere in 2013. This article explores the work's place within the broader context of European literature, music and art, before shifting to a consideration of the piece's subtle hybrid form and its unique rhythmic structures. Abrahamsen's great interest in close (but not exact) symmetrical relationships is considered at some length, and the influence of figures ranging from St Augustine to Joyce, Bach to Webern, Caspar David Friedrich to Per Kirkeby is also observed. Extensive conversations with the composer in recent years provide primary material, and Abrahamsen's fascination with the musical properties of time – its construction and its destruction – displayed in these conversations has informed the decision to structure the article around these twin properties of form and rhythm.

Autoschediasms, the American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey's conception of spontaneous composition, casts the participants as equals. The decision-making power is balanced between Sorey and the instrumentalists. Focusing on the 2020 performance of Autoschediasms by Sorey and the contemporary-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, presented as part of the ensemble's Video Chat Variations series, this article limns the experience of Autoschediasms and asks: what is the sensory counterpart to Sorey's democratic ethos? In Autoschediasms, I argue, it is timbre that synchronises the performers’ interactions, in all their care and openness, with the pressures and freedoms of listening. Timbre activates absorbing, unforeseen, manifold variation in the composition. This sonic impression of democratic music-making around and across difference comes to reflect the conditions of radical humanity and vulnerability inherent in spontaneity. Through close listening, and in dialogue with critical improvisation studies and timbre theory, I suggest that Autoschediasms illuminates the ethical dimension of timbre: what timbre can do for the aspiration towards musical inclusivity.

This article discusses Nautilus (2022), a composition for solo bass flute created using machine-learning techniques and a Unity game engine. We consider the approaches we adopted and how they enhanced creativity and musicianship for those involved. We reflect on Unity's potential as a novel and flexible driver for the creation of a musical score in which traditional elements of compositional design are presented to a performer as a co-creator for interpretation and communication inside the act of musicking. Through this we offer insights into performer agency and how a performer decodes media, sound, images and AI through their instrument, personal skills and musical aesthetic. We describe how the notion of a music score was re-conceptualised, transforming our understanding of the activities of composition, collaboration and performance.

In this transcription of an interview between the former Editor of New Music at BBC Radio 3 and the composer Justin Connolly, Connolly discusses his life as a composer. He traces his development from childhood to studies at the Royal College of Music and Yale University and the influence of the composer Roberto Gerhard. Connolly's Poems of Wallace Stevens IV, his most recent work at the time of the interview, is considered in particular detail. The interview took place at the former British Music Information Centre in Stratford Place, London on 14 April 1993. TEMPO gratefully acknowledges the work of the Estate of Justin Connolly in transcribing the interview and permitting its publication.

This article scrutinises the composer Jonathan Harvey's remark that ‘most of my colleagues see me as wearing two hats: one a church music composer's, the other an avant-garde instrumental/electronic composer's. I wish I could say it was one hat. I think of all my music as sacred in a sense.’ The article considers Harvey's church and concert works as linked worlds in order to propose a more holistic appreciation of his stylistic and technical innovations and that, far from being occasional pieces, his music for the church played an active role in the development of the composer's language, in part because singing was a formative experience for Harvey, and in part because collaborative work with choirs, church musicians and associated artists and thinkers was so frequently fertile. Based on the composer's own notes to the author, the article concludes with an account of the composition process involved in the creation of Plainsongs for Peace and Light (2012), a work for unaccompanied mixed choir or 16 solo voices, which the composer described as ‘elaborations’ of chant.

This article traces the creative process of six to five, a work for 20 guitarists with a special role for the conductor, premiered by the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp's guitar ensemble. The piece was commissioned by the author from the American composer Jessie Marino as part of research into the role of the instrumentalised conductor. The article explores the ways in which Marino deployed the conductor to meet her artistic goals, testing at each step the extent to which her utilisation rises to the level of instrumentalisation. Applying political theories offered by, among others, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the article also considers the extent to which Marino deployed the conductor as a tactical leader in both the rehearsal process and the performance of six to five.