This article considers if and how the five string quartets of the South African composer Michael Blake, written between 2001 and 2014, could be considered as contributing to the compositional and discursive construct that is ‘African art music’. ‘African art music’ has often been evoked in connection with the compositional practices of West African composers especially but has received little consideration and scrutiny of its possible applications to South African composition. The political and artistic isolation of South Africa from the rest of Africa during much of the twentieth century is an obvious reason why this has been the case. But there is also the possibility that white South African composers during and after apartheid have engaged in composition from different intellectual and aesthetic starting points, compared to their African counterparts, due to the specific kind of coloniality they inhabit. The five string quartets afford a perspective on how Michael Blake negotiated the continuities of compositional authority and universalised commitment to a traditional Western sound ideal in the string quartet, with the self-awareness that white composition in post-apartheid South Africa arguably requires.

This article proposes ways of reimagining how performers and audiences relate to one another during live performances. In contrast to forms of participation where audiences emulate well-known performer and/or composer models, the authors argue for sensitivity to audiences as they present themselves. Attending to, reciprocating and adopting audience behaviour in/as performance can lead to novel interactions, identities and formats for creative practice. The authors discuss pieces by Pauline Oliveros, David Helbich and Carolyn Chen, as well as their own practice research.

This article discusses touch-related works by the British composer–performer Andy Ingamells, works that that make up a large part of his oeuvre. In particular the article focuses on a series of works created during the last decade: Tape Piece (2012), The Ticklish Subject (2013), Having never seen (a) Ghost (2014), Waschen (2015), He That Plays The English Gentlemen Shall Be Welcome (2016), Petting Zoo (2019) and Petting Pisco (2020). These works exemplify Ingamells' understanding of music in general, but now, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, they can also be seen very differently as a commentary on social activities that people had to forego because of contact restrictions during the pandemic.

This article explores ways in which compositional methods can respond to and articulate the specificity of localness, interrogating ideas of place, identity, collaboration and the local through an examination of the methods used by professional Birmingham composers to open out aspects of their compositional approach to the wider community. I share my findings from for-Wards, an ambitious public music project: an artistic collaboration between myself, ten professional Birmingham composers, nine music organisations and residents from Birmingham to create a musical ode to the city. Non-conventional compositional approaches became instrumental in the development of this innovative project, documenting the experience of the local within an ambitious citywide collaboration. The article considers the for-Wards project's background, notions of the hyperlocal, the artistic team, ideas relating to authorship, the compositional framework and collaborative challenges. The article considers the collaborative compositional methods employed by the for-Wards composers to examine the local, including local histories and their playful variants, field recordings, environmental vocalisations and the visualisation of the local.

The Belgian new-music ensemble Nadar created a Zoom performance titled FITTINGinSIDE, which is tailored to a world in the grip of a pandemic. It balances ritual, artistic play and collective performance, all blended in a way that astonishes the ears. We followed Nadar's course through the pandemic and studied their techniques. How did Nadar manage to turn the crisis into – yet again – a new, creative starting point? How ‘live’ did the new ‘live’ feel? And is FITTINGinSIDE the format of the future?

In this interview the composer Thomas Meadowcroft discusses his radiophonic work Talkback Burnback, from its genesis and source material to its assembly. The work is placed in the wider context of Meadowcroft's earlier radiophonic works, Song Buslines (2013) and Moving Home (2016), and considered in relation to the different traditions of radiophonic works, sound art, podcasts and the Hörspiel.

This text was written in response to a commission from Berliner Festspiele/MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2021. Juliet Fraser collaborated with filmmaker Jessie Rodger to create an experimental video essay that layered raw footage of Juliet in her erstwhile London studio space, reading her own words, reflecting on the words of others and doing her singing practice. The result offered a glimpse into one artist's efforts to remain creative and connected during the time of Covid. What follows is the written essay; the full video essay, Inside Out, can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96xf41-_PA.

Contemporary music festivals are a neatly packaged way of encountering a variety of new and recent pieces, where someone else has done the hard work and chosen them for you. In our online/streaming life, rather than surfing Bandcamp or similar and following our own predilections, these festivals, in a healthy way, force you to confront your musical barriers and to harmonise your prejudices. In the UK and Ireland, Ilan Volkov's Glasgow Tectonics, Eamon Quinn's Louth and Graham McKenzie's Huddersfield seem to me the most interesting at the moment. There are, of course, other useful and enterprising festivals: some are a mixed bag of old and new, some are composer-led or have other agendas, so they have built-in filtering – in other words, prejudices. Festival directors have their likes and dislikes too, I guess, but the evidence from the three mentioned above demonstrates an openness and a researched risk-taking: Huddersfield, with McKenzie in charge, is more open than most, presenting quite a range of different genres and media.

While an atmosphere of reconnection has inevitably surrounded many recent concert experiences, the sense of reunion in the sixteenth-century surroundings of St Michael le Belfrey – in the shadow of York Minster – on this early autumn evening was more tangible than usual. Friends, colleagues and followers of Vic Hoyland were that night finally able to gather, nearly a year later than originally planned, to celebrate the 75th birthday of a composer who has spent more than five decades of his life carving a distinctive path through the British music scene.