Param Vir was born in Delhi in 1952 and has lived and worked in Britain since 1984. His greatest success has been in opera, and the two orchestral works in his catalogue also testify to a remarkable theatrical sensibility. Vir's music embodies and feeds off the contradictions of his life. Although rooted firmly in the modernist aesthetic of Western contemporary music, Vir's Indian background and education have left a mark on his music. His emigration has resulted in alienation from a national identity, leaving him an outsider both in India and Britain. He is contracted to a venerable English publisher – Novello & Co. – but is himself outside the contemporary music establishment and academy. These contradictions are reflected both in Vir's central themes of otherness and self-discovery and his exploration of exotic and colourful instrumental sonorities, which together make him an important and unusual voice in contemporary music.

The towering international reputation of Toru Takemitsu has dominated the West's perceptions of contemporary Japanese music, a situation resulting in the relative neglect of other worthy composers. This phenomenon has parallels in other countries, such as France, where Boulez's and Messiaen's overshadowing reputations were factors in the delayed international recognition of Barraqué and Ohana. Accordingly, various important composers who have established significant profiles within Japan during the last 40 years have struggled to achieve attention beyond Asian borders. Some have established cult reputations within contemporary music circles, but more widespread recognition through recordings has been compromised by limited Western distribution of the two Japanese labels that have promoted the post-Takemitsu generations: Camerata and Fontec. Fortunately, the websites for these labels have provided an opportunity for curious Westerners to directly purchase much important music that is ripe for discovery in Western concert halls. Another positive development is the recent release of European recordings of important new Japanese works.

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Nicholas Jones and Anthony Powers in Lower Breinton, Hereford, on 28 April 2003. Square-bracketed dates and other parentheses are editorial.

Two of the most important goals for music composition during the past century were innovation and originality. In reaching for these goals, many composers abandoned tonal protocol, looking instead for new ways to generate coherence in their music. In the absence of traditional voice leading based on tonic/dominant harmony, some composers gravitated toward the use of symmetry. By symmetry I mean the projection of a series of events above and below, or forward and backward from a central axis, with a one-to-one correspondence between events on one side of the axis and those on the other. In this article, I will focus primarily on vertical symmetry in pitch space. Because horizontal symmetry often accompanies vertical symmetry, however, it cannot be set aside altogether. George Crumb's La luna está muerta, muerta… from Night of the Four Moons, for example, contains several symmetrical pitch collections, arranged in the manner of a balanced arch-form. As Ex. 1 illustrates, four pitch sets, comprising a single symmetrical interval series, occur over the course of the composition. The pitch sets in the first half of the composition, moreover, are presented in reverse order – and, hence, upside down – in the second half, transferring symmetry into the linear dimension; the events in the second half of the piece, that is, mirror those in the first half, just as the intervals above the pitch axis mirror those below it in each of the pitch collections.

When Lan Shui, Music Director of the Singapore Symphony, began the 14–15 November 2003 pair of concerts with Joan Tower's first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, he specifically had in mind who would follow: Evelyn Glennie, who entered wearing a black lace blouse with solid black breast-plate, black lace cape, and hot, tight, flaming red sequined slacks with a large bare metal cross around her neck. I exclaimed, ‘Now that's the kind of priest I'd like in my church!’

A Vision and a Journey is David Matthews's op. 60 – a neat coincidence, then, that the first performance of its revised version should be part of the celebrations of his sixtieth birthday. The work is part of a series of imposing orchestral scores Matthews has been composing over the past two decades, beginning with In the Dark Time in 1983 and continuing with Chaconne in 1985 and The Music of Dawn two years later; this one followed in 1993, when it was premièred by Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC Philharmonic, but it underwent a thoroughgoing revision between March 1996 and March 1997. I asked the composer before the concert what the revisions had entailed: ‘I completely rewrote the whole thing. It's more or less a new work’.

The demise of the Symphony is frequently announced, yet easily refuted by the quality of contemporary works bearing that title. Many recent examples have been written by British composers – Anthony Powers's Second, James MacMillan's Third, David Matthews's Fifth and Peter Maxwell Davies's Seventh, for example. To this distinguished list must be added Julian Anderson's Symphony. His four previous orchestral works contain sufficient structural ingenuity and intellectual rigour to make the cogency of his new piece no great surprise, yet it also offers some of Anderson's most lyrical as well as intricate writing.

Big Noise – heard in London on 21 November and repeated at the Dome (Corn Exchange) in Brighton on the 22nd – was a collaboration between the highly idiosyncratic New Music ensembles Orkest de Volharding (Holland) and Icebreaker (UK). The former was established by the amazingly influential Dutch composer Louis Andriessen: reacting against the elitist music of his youth, he saw the need for a new type of Art-music ensemble which could travel into the streets and play music with a broad appeal. Borrowing from the model of Dutch street bands (the equivalent, perhaps, of the UK's brass bands), jazz of the 1920s, Minimal music coming out of America and the European avant-garde, Andriessen created an ensemble and a language with an overt non-elitist agenda.