In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

‘To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with,’ declares John Cage of his contradictory relationship with the older composer. If paradox summarizes this particular discourse between an interested pupil and his predecessor, however, it is both a compositional and musicological discourse exploring the juxtaposition of explicit historicism and aesthetic distance, or ‘disinterest’. The project, or rather the problem, of musical ‘neutrality’ is one that Cage inherited from his idol and subsequently adopted with enthusiasm, as his stubborn pre-occupation with Erik Satie's 1918 symphonic drama, Socrate, evinces. Cage's initial encounter with Satie's work seems quickly to have inspired a commitment to interrogating modernism's engagement with history. Having been introduced to Socrate by Virgil Thomson in a performance that, in Anthony Tommasini's words, ‘profoundly changed Cage, [who] grew to revere Satie’, Cage immediately set out to adapt the score for Merce Cunningham's ballet Idyllic Song in 1947. Denied copyright permission for his two-piano arrangement, Cage resourcefully set out to re-write the musical accompaniment for the ballet (and appease the disobliging publishers) more than two decades later in 1969, retaining Satie's original phrasing in order to preserve Cunningham's choreography and sardonically re-titling the piece Cheap Imitation.

Following Milton Babbitt's untimely death at the age of 94 (death at any age is untimely, since it unties the time dimension) in January 2011, I was interested in finding out more about his relationship, personal and music-theoretical, with the US information science community during and after the Eisenhower years. The musical avant-garde represented in parody by Babbitt and Cage as two poles of an antithesis sprang into life in the Cold War era at the same time as Scientology, MAD and Playboy magazine. Today the US doyen of priapism is ready to admit that even the best formula for a creative life has its natural limits. I wanted to ask Joseph Straus and Jerry Kohl what they thought of Babbitt's influence in the wider context of cognitive linguistics. In addition to positioning Babbitt as a significant influence on the Russian composer's serial music in the instructive Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Joseph Straus is co-editor (with Stephen Dembski) of Babbitt's Words about Music. Jerome Kohl is a fellow Stockhausen enthusiast and distinguished former editor of Perspectives of New Music, a periodical set up in the 1960s to assert US authority in new musical theory and practice by an editorial board including Babbitt and graced by a logo in honour of serial music devised by Stravinsky himself.

EG:Who – except Stéphane Mallarmé – is being portrayed in your principal work Pli selon pli – portrait de Mallarmé? Nobody? The listener? Or Pierre Boulez himself?

PB: I think that it is a double portrait: It is a portrait of Mallarmé and myself. Of course Mallarmé is a poet who has been terribly important to me. The kind of relationship we had, our working together – in spite of the difference in centuries! – brings up somebody else: That is the portrait of a kind of mixture of Mallarmé and me, finally.

• London, Barbican: James Clarke ‘Untitled No. 2’ Paul Conway

• Baku: Qara Qarayev Festival Alecander Ivashkin

• London, St George's Church: Benjamin Ellen Malcolm Miller

• Buxton Opera House; ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ Tim Mottershead

• London and Durham: James MacMillan Paul Conway

• London, Bridewell Theatre: Robert Hugill Jill Barlow

• Zagreb: International Contemporary Music Festival Donata Premeru

• Further reports from Liverpool and London Paul Conway, Martin Anderson, Malcolm Miller

• Leon Kirchner David Matthews

• Begin Again: John Cage Rodney Lister

• Schuman, Persichetti, Mennin Bret Johnson

• Twelve-tone Dallapiccola Tim Mottershead

• Havergal Brian round-up Martyn Becker

• Unsuk Chin Arnold Whittall

• Jörg Widmann Colin Clarke

• Kagel Cello Works Bernard Hughes

• Further Reviews Paul Conway, Calum MacDonald, Peter Palmer, Guy Rickards, Clemens Gresser, Colin Clarke, Rodney Lister, Arnold Whittall, Tim Mottershead, Bret Johnson, Jill Barlow