Sur Incises, first performed in 1998, is the most recent major work by Pierre Boulez, but there has been very little published writing discussing it, although Boulez himself discussed the piece in a lecture released on DVD. Like many of his recent works, Sur Incises reworks existing material – taking the short piano piece Incises and expanding it into a large-scale work for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists. This article examines how the gestures, harmonies and even the instrumentation of the earlier piece are ‘refracted’ – presented in multiple overlaid versions as if a prism had revealed the possibilities inherent in the original material. Sur Incises is discussed with reference to common concerns in Boulez's work since the 1970s – its use of quasi-thematic ‘signals’ to mark structure, its use of luxurious harmonic fields and chord multiplication, its virtuosic toccata material, and its use of the SACHER hexachord.

This interview with Elliott Carter, conducted on 30 May 2012, is among the last that he gave. Carter talks candidly about his past, the present, and what his legacy will be. While discussing his latest works – a series of short epigrams and a new setting of Wallace Stevens poems – Carter explains how each composition is a unique musical adventure; consequently, he does not repeat himself. Innovation is the essence of Carter's oeuvre, clearly manifested in his string quartets, which Carter still views as his grandest musical statements. He speaks openly about the difficulties of getting these and other works performed well, the lack of performances of his compositions on the West Coast, and the current trends and direction of composition today. Carter recalls important experiences and events in his life involving Nadia Boulanger, Ives, Cage, Boulez, and Stravinsky.

The ‘Nocturne’ from Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) presents a number of interesting melodic and motivic features effectively modelled by aspects of diatonic transformational theories. Following a brief review of important transformational operations in diatonic set theory (transposition within Mod-7 diatonic space, diatonic interval cycles, and ‘signature transformation’), this article presents an analysis of the ‘Nocturne’ drawing upon both traditional and recent developments in diatonic transformational theory. Doing so illustrates an intricate compositional technique, one that traces motivic associations in the vocal line, the horn part and the accompanying strings. A close reading reveals that these motivic techniques stem from the generic concept of echoing and reverberation at the heart of Tennyson's poem.

In 2007, two high-profile musical responses to the Christian Passion narrative were written: the little match girl passion, by American composer David Lang, and Scottish composer James MacMillan's St John Passion. A devout Catholic, MacMillan's faith has influenced almost every work he has written to date, and a passion setting therefore seemed inevitable. Lang, on the other hand, has Jewish roots, and is relatively secular in his choice of extra-musical themes in his works: even when using sacred texts, he usually sets them in a secular context. Unsurprisingly, MacMillan's and Lang's contrasting approaches towards the Christian Passion resulted in fundamentally different works, yet both composers cite Bach as a key inspiration in their settings. This study examines the extent to which the influence of Bach's St Matthew Passion, in particular, is present in this pair of 21st-century passions, with regard to both their music and their theology.

The full score of Béla Bartók's one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) reached its final form through many intermediate stages and after many years. The most comprehensive revision had been carried out in 1917 before Bluebeard was finally put on the programme of the Budapest Opera House. Bartók's revisions concerned not only the ending of the opera and the vocal parts but also the instrumentation. On the basis of all available primary sources, the present article examines how the instrumentation changed between 1911 and 1925, when the full score was published by Universal Edition. As a result of experiences gained during rehearsals of The Wooden Prince in 1917, Bartók added two instruments, the celesta and the xylophone, which he had originally not used in Bluebeard. However, the original score included two tenor tuba parts, which he later replaced with trumpets and trombones. In the revised score Bartók applied new instrumental techniques, corrected an unplayable passage, made the orchestral material thinner in favour of the vocal parts, and altered the instrumentation in order to emphasize motivic connections. Most of these alterations, however, do not represent a conceptual change in the opera's instrumentation but rather realize Bartók's original ideas in a more precise and more elaborate way.

As diverse and inquiring as ever, the 35th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival provided nine days of unfamiliar and rarely encountered repertoire, sometimes rewarding, sometimes baffling, but always worth sampling. The 2012 late-November celebration of avant-gardism placed an emphasis on Norway and the voice in its many guises, both strands exemplified by the choice of Trondheim-born vocalist Maja S. K. Ratkje as composer-in-residence. Yet despite this spotlight on vocal and choral works, there was no shortage of instrumental and chamber music, most of it new to Britain.

In its unswerving devotion to new music at its most uncompromising, the Flemish Transit Festival represents a model of the kind of festival that has now almost vanished from Britain. Based in the intimate university town of Leuven, the 2012 festival was the thirteenth: 48 hours of music and events concentrated into a weekend, running from Friday night to Sunday (26–28 October). Located mainly in the unprepossessing concrete 1970s STUK arts centre (with surprisingly good acoustics), the 12 events (plus pre-concert talks) followed upon one another with a rapidity that almost negated the opportunity to draw breath, let alone eat in between.

If I had to sum up Martinů's opera Julietta in one word, it would be ‘strange’. Strange and wonderful, strange bordering on the weird, the otherworldly, the dream-like. This last redefinition is apt, since the opera is based on Georges Neveux's play Juliette, ou La clé des songes – the Key to Dreams, a benign nightmare where a Parisian bookseller, Michel, searches for, finds, loses and finally searches again for a girl encountered briefly three years earlier. The action opens with his return and discovery that she lives in a town where no one has much depth of memory beyond the previous ten minutes! And when random shafts of recollection from further back do occur – as in the scene in the Forest with the Wine Waiter and the Old Couple – they only add to the surrealism of the situation and Michel's deepening confusion, with that pointed imprecision so natural in dreams yet so out of place in reality.

The world première of Jörg Widmann's new opera Babylon, conducted by Kent Nagano at the Bayerische Staatsoper, on 27 October 2012, was an evening to remember, for both the spectacular production and the musical performances. It began with a poignant announcement from the stage that Widmann had dedicated the performance in gratitude to the memory of his teacher, Hans Werner Henze, who had died that very morning in Dresden at the age of 86. One's thoughts turned to Henze's own wonderful operatic oeuvre, especially The Bassarids, which shared with Babylon an interest in ancient myth and pastiche. Yet curiously, it was a totally different postmodern influence on Widmann that seemed more evident here: that of another mentor, Wolfgang Rihm.

A substantial new work by Alexander Goehr, lasting some 37 minutes in performance and scored for tenor solo, children's voices and ensemble, constituted the second half of the opening concert of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's 25th anniversary season. This world première of the latest BCMG ‘Sound Investment’ commission was conducted by Oliver Knussen, whose discerning advocacy of Goehr's music is deep-rooted and long established.

In conceiving his latest large-scale work for string quartet and orchestra, John Adams states that its inception arose from a lifelong obsession with the music of Beethoven. Out of this fixation, the first impulse for creating a referential work of musical homage came to Adams from hearing a performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, a ballet known for its conscious borrowing of material from the 18th-century composer Pergolesi. It is that absorption of another composer's vernacular and fashioning it into a new and unique musical work that provides the primary creative foundation for Absolute Jest.

When the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra wanted to commission Kaija Saariaho for a work to perform at the Westergasfabriek Gashoulder, a gasholder building restored as a performance space, it did so through a consortium including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony. The Boston Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Mena, gave the first American performance of the work, entitled Circle Map, in Symphony Hall in November.

Due to Hurricane Sandy, the New York-based JACK Quartet were unable to cross the Atlantic to join forces with the Arditti Quartet at London's Wigmore Hall on 31 October 2012 for the British premières, now postponed, of 2012-S for two string quartets by James Clarke and the string octet Kampf zwischen Karneval und Fasten by Mauro Lanza. In lieu, the Ardittis substituted James Clarke's String Quartet No. 1 (2002–03) and Wolfgang Rihm's String Quartet No. 13 (2011), joining the first performances in the UK, as originally advertised, of quartets by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen and British-born, Berlin-domiciled Rebecca Saunders.

Michael Zev Gordon had an intriguing idea in choosing to centre his new piece – Bohortha – on a visit he made to the small hamlet of this name that lies in a remote Cornwall peninsula, close to the sea: he sought to explore the concept of ‘the passing of time’. So it was that the world première of Bohortha was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on 3 October 2012, opening a programme to also include Mahler's highly emotive Rückert Lieder and was then completely outflanked after the interval by a rare performance of Shostakovich's starkly political Symphony No. 4.

An 80th birthday concert full of the spirit of youthful exploration reflected the innovative interactive aesthetic of Andre Hajdu, the Hungarian-Israeli composer, whose oeuvre is gradually gaining wider international exposure. Presented by the Jerusalem Music Centre on 29 March 2012, the programme featured works from the last quarter of a century for chamber duo and solo piano, including two premières, culminating in an improvisational interactive jam session by an array of students and colleagues, joined by the composer himself at the piano. To begin was Hajdu's Sonatine for Flute and Cello (1990) ‘in the French style’ performed with panache by the flautist Yossi Arnheim and cellist Amir Eldan. It is an elegantly written work radiating the spirit of Hajdu's teachers Milhaud and (less overtly) Messiaen, with whom he studied in Paris in the 1950s and 60s. Beneath the light-hearted veneer of polyphonic textures is a serious, plangent expressiveness. The first movement, libre et gai, moves from the chirpy, Poulenc-like delicacy of a cat-and-mouse imitative chase, building tension towards a final stretto. In the second movement, molto moderato, Arnheim wove a lyrical cantilena for flute over gentle cello accompaniments, giving way to rarified high cello registers shadowed by eloquent lower lines of the flute. An exuberant dance-like finale, Libre mais un peu rythmé, increased in drama before receding to a tranquil conclusion.