The glowing critical response to Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (2000) has focused particularly on the visceral effect created by Haas's use of ‘endless’ scales, richly saturated microtonal chords, and passages that take place in total darkness. Discussion of these features has often led reviewers and commentators to use forms of description and praise which evoke the old (but lately rejuvenated) aesthetic category of the sublime. This article explores these connections with sublime aesthetics in more detail as a way of clarifying both philosophical and interpretative perspectives on in vain. The idea of the sublime serves as a thread connecting aspects of spectral technique and aesthetics, the mathematical visions of M.C. Escher, and the charged socio-political context in which the work was written.

I first performed Salut für Caudwell (1977) at November Music in Den Bosch, two and half years ago. The festival celebrated Lachenmann's eightieth birthday in grand style, and the composer himself attended. During a backstage chat, Lachenmann, whom I've known for around 20 years, casually hinted that there were things ‘missing’ in the print edition of the work, published in 1985: that is, that performative information in the fair copy was not fully reproduced in the print edition. At that moment, my curiosity was piqued intensely, and the seed of a new edition was planted. While I understood the formidable challenges involved in properly preparing the part, rehearsing, and traversing this Everest of the guitar literature, I was not fully prepared for the astonishing array of hazards that awaited me. This article describes the labyrinth of sketches, drafts, and score iterations I encountered in beginning to prepare a new edition of Salut for Lachenmann's publishers, Breitkopf & Härtel.

The Lithuanian composer Egidija Medekšaitė (b. 1979) has developed a practice in which she uses the principles of textile weaving to make musical compositions. This article introduces a series of works created in the last three years in which she has refined these techniques; it also considers the nature of the relationship between the textile patterns that Medekšaitė uses as the basis for these works and the resultant music. In particular the article focuses on an analytical account of four works: Âkâsha for string orchestra (2015), the string quartet Megh Malhar (2016), a setting of the Nunc dimittis (2018), and Sattva for electronics and accordion (2018).

Stockhausen's idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs, and the vigour with which he expressed them in his compositional processes, have sometimes been an obstacle to both musicians and audiences in engaging with his music. I explore the extent to which the ability to appreciate Stockhausen's music is predicated on a sympathy with his spiritual world view. I pose a broad view of Stockhausen's spirituality, not reliant on theism, through drawing on three key sources: the composer's own commentary on spirituality and its connections with his serialist compositional techniques; Rudolf Otto's notions of an intrinsically human awareness of ‘the holy’; and the connections of mathematics with human truth drawn by Alain Badiou. I argue that a broader understanding of Stockhausen's spirituality enables a pathway into his music that can be shared by both theists and atheists, and that this can produce a rich fodder for each in their curiosity about human place in the world.

Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970) is one of the most widely performed living French composers, but his work is hardly programmed in Britain. He is well represented in commercial recordings and has been championed by the conductor Stéphane Denève across Europe and the United States. His music is in a post-minimalist, quasi-tonal language that is both engaging and contemporary, and he places himself in the firmly in the ‘musical family’ of French composers.

This article is based on keynote presentations that the author gave in December 2015 at the New Emergences conference at Splendor, Amsterdam, and in June 2018 at the Gender and Diversity in Music-Making conference at Monash University, Australia.

Unfolding over ten days in September 2018, this year's edition of Ultima was centred on the theme of migration, with a focus on both music and people. In his preface to the festival programme, Thørbjorn Tønder Hansen, the new artistic director, writes, ‘The borders of contemporary music are happily eroding, and the scene is in constant flux’. Responding to the multiple pressures of asylum seekers in Europe, demographic inequities in the representation of artists and composers, and the growing collective sense that ‘New Music’ is on the cusp of some kind of significant re-orientation, Hansen and his curatorial team produced a significant accomplishment by bringing together such a varied selection of programming. The range of installations included symphonic work; multi-channel acousmatic pieces with live diffusion to performance pieces with new applications of technology; and experimental theatre pieces set inside the black box or at a rugged outdoor setting far beyond Oslo's city limits. Ultima tipped its cap to just about anything that could set foot within the expanded terrain of ‘music composition’ today.

Gwyn Pritchard's music has a restless, pulsating energy that ebbs and flows within a precise framework. One is left with the impression of purposeful craft, which guides the ear with intention and sophistication. His works are complex and sometimes formidable, filled with detail and constructed with great precision.

Beckett's 1976 poem ‘Roundelay’ is sung as a Prologue to Kurtág's opera, Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie – scènes et monologues, opéra en un acte, which was premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 15 November 2018. As an opening gesture it recalls Duke Bluebeard's Castle, in which a spoken Prologue enigmatically conjures a world of fairy-tale that simultaneously reveals a psycho-drama (where is the stage? outside or inside?). ‘Roundelay’ is yet more enigmatic but similarly prescient: we are entering a time-space in which the sound of words is as important as their meaning, and where lonely characters attempt to cope with their sense of imminent end, mysteriously near and yet also bafflingly unreachable. The voice itself is also prophetic, sung as it is by the opera's only female character, Nell, who in Pierre Audi's production is only partly visible, illuminated as if a ghost in a spot of light amid the darkness, hovering well above the stage. There is a normatively bleak perspective on gender at play throughout: Nell's other-worldliness and incongruous melodiousness here anticipate her barely acknowledged death and the consequent obliteration of love.