This article discusses the concept, working practices and outcomes of the Concrescence Project, a research project initiated by the author oriented towards innovations in vocal practice and composition through experiments with combining vocal techniques from different cultures. The concept of ethnomodernism is explored, as are different attitudes to vocal sound production in a variety of musical traditions including the avant-garde, traditional styles from the Nordic/Baltic region, and overtone singing. The article concludes with a discussion of microtonal tunings, their notation, and their implementation in vocal composition.

This article is an interview with the Franco-Slovenian composer, conductor and trombonist Vinko Globokar, translated, edited and introduced by the author. It offers an overview of Globokar's musical development and a consideration of his artistic position, which straddles the worlds of composition and improvisation. Globokar's music combines complex organisation with an interest in non-hierarchical and improvisatory elements. He has always refused to pit the avant-garde claims of contemporary music against those of free jazz, his music embracing aspects of both, as well as of traditional Balkan musics. His genre-defying approach remains better known in continental Europe than in the UK or North America, and the present text is a contribution to the limited bibliography on Globokar in English.

This paper explores the use of heterophonic tunings, the gradual substitution of pitches from one harmonic series to another resulting in the simultaneous sounding of different and sometimes contrasting intonations, in the music of the American composer Larry Polansky. The discussion is contextualised by an exploration of the innovations in tuning practice in the work of an earlier generation of American composers. The ramifications of Polansky's compositional ideas in terms of notation and performability are examined with reference to several key works, notably for jim, ben and lou; freeHorn; and ii-v-i.

This article explores recent, radical developments in the ways in which new music is programmed and presented. It is contextualised by a brief survey of new music programming across the history of public concert-giving, and by several new interviews with industry professionals in the UK. These illustrate various rationales behind current practice including the dissatisfaction with traditional modes of concert-giving where appropriate. They also inform the author's conviction that different branches of new music benefit from different forms of presentation, acknowledging the importance of innovative forms to certain new styles.

Matthias Pintscher was granted the sixth Roche Commissions award in 2012, when Sofia Gubaidulina had to withdraw at short notice. Pintscher's Roche commission, Chute d’étoiles, coincidentally received its London premiere within a few days of the UK premiere of Gubaidulina's The Rider on the White Horse. Roche deserve the thanks of the music world for their initiative, running since 2004 but hardly suffering from over-exposure. Their choice of composers has been good: Birtwistle, Benjamin, Hosokawa – and Unsuk Chin slated for 2014. The link with the Lucerne Festival and Cleveland Orchestra (which gave the world and US premieres of the Pintscher piece) is also marvellously helpful. While it's debatable whether luminaries like Sir Harrison need the exposure, the focus on the now-coming-to-major-prominence generation (Chin was born in 1961, Pintscher 10 years later) is welcome.

Mark Anthony Turnage's Frieze – performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on 11 August – and Nashit Kahn's The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra – performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton on 12 August – both raise the question of how, in a new piece, one can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage's work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organisation's bicentennial and to share a programme as their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work, which is clearly modelled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in Turnage's own language on the older one. Kahn's concerto brings together an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way.

As in previous Proms seasons, Cadogan Hall's 2013 chamber concerts series presented some of the most interesting repertoire. On 5 August, Tine Thing Helseth and her all-female brass ensemble tenThing gave the world premiere of a new piece by Diana Burrell. She has already written a substantial work for brass ensemble, Gold, dating from 2001 (which also requires 3 gongs and a piano), and her new BBC commission has a similarly punchy title capturing the bright and burnished qualities of its instrumentation – Blaze. Scored for three trumpets, flugelhorn, horn, three tenor trombones, bass trombone and tuba, this virtuosic, 10-minute showcase grabbed the audience's attention from the start with a striking, fanfare-like idea that recurred in extended form as unison chords during the closing bars, providing an incandescent coda. In a brief pre-performance talk, the composer spoke of the often-untapped technical capabilities of brass instruments, and her demanding piece successfully tapped into this potential, as she gave each performer a chance to shine within its teeming textures. In addition to these challenging solo episodes, the score was memorable for its inventive deployment of various combinations of instruments, denoting a genuinely chamber-oriented work. Blaze provided a strong focal point for a programme that otherwise consisted solely of arrangements, nearly all by guitarist Jarle Storløkken, of repertoire originally conceived for other forces, such as piano pieces by Grieg and excerpts from Carmen and The Threepenny Opera.

Robin Holloway's brief illustrative list of composers who populate the ‘continuing or reconstructed mainstream’ begins in Britain, with ‘Tippett and Britten, hence Maw and both Matthewses’ and ends with the broader international sweep of ‘Takemitsu, Knussen and Lieberson (stemming equally from serialism à la Berg and à la late Stravinsky); hence Lindberg, Benjamin, Turnage, Anderson, Adès and all’. Whilst these groupings, which position David Matthews and Thomas Adès towards opposing ends of the continuum, might be inadvertent, the premieres of their latest works, given over consecutive (and swelteringly hot) nights in July, would appear to strengthen such a polarity.

This year's Proms prospectus was the sixth to bear Roger Wright's name at the bottom of the preface, and under his aegis the Proms have taken on a non-doctrinaire openness that have seen some refreshing programming choices, among them Langgaard's wonderfully weird Music of the Spheres in 2010 and his six-minute Eleventh Symphony (complete with four concertante tubas) in 2012; between them, in 2011, came the most important of all maverick works, Brian's Gothic Symphony, almost tailor-made for the Proms and, more importantly, one of music's masterpieces. In the 37 years of my experience of the Proms (I went to my first one in 1977, God help me) new music has followed a longer-term but essentially similar trend of what one might call disindoctrination, as composers have increasingly felt free to write what they wanted to write rather than what they were expected to write. In my early Promming days you expected to have to fight for your new music: most of it inhabited varying degrees of uncompromising modernism.

There is a certain audacity to four young curators adopting the title ‘London Contemporary Music Festival’ for their first large-scale collective venture. For a festival that deliberately sets out to sidestep the musical establishment, there's an aspect of calculated provocation in the appropriation of a title that would seem to be the preserve of that establishment. The gesture, however, goes some way further than staking a symbolic claim. At the same time as the curators (Aisha Orazbayeva, Sam Mackay, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Lucy Railton, in collaboration with the commissioning body Bold Tendencies, based at the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park) have effectively bypassed the establishment networks and funding structures, they have set out a clear alternative narrative about how contemporary music may yet be practised and understood.

This concert at the Bridgewater Hall, by the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Tecwyn Evans, featured three world premieres commissioned by MIF 2013 from the late John Tavener, together with Mahamatar from 2000 (featuring Sufi singer Abida Parveen, following a rare UK appearance the previous evening, and performed to a screening of Werner Herzog's 2001 film Pilgrimage) and his 1968 choral piece In Alium.

John McCabe is most closely associated with large-scale orchestral statements, notably in concertante and symphonic forms and in ballet scores, yet chamber and instrumental music has recently played an increasingly significant role within his oeuvre. Of his vocal music, unaccompanied choral works such as the carols have attracted most attention, whilst his major contributions to the choral-orchestral repertoire, such as the large-scale cantata, Voyage (1972) and the extended song cycle for soloists, choir and large orchestra, Songs of the Garden (both Three Choirs Festival commissions, for 1972 and 2009, respectively), are considerably less widely known. It was with keen anticipation and no little curiosity, then, that I attended the first performance of McCabe's latest work for chorus and orchestra on 16 March 2013 at St John's, Smith Square.

Sciarrino's two-act chamber opera Luci mie traditrici is based on the true story of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo's brutal murder of his wife and her lover. Numerous composers in the last 50 years or so have been sufficiently fascinated by Gesualdo to write works based on his life or music, including seven operas appearing in the last two decades. Sciarrino based his libretto on a drama written only 50 years after Gesualdo's death by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini. This UK premiere conducted by Michael Rafferty was given at the Buxton Festival by Music Theatre Wales, translated into English by Paola Loreto (and set to the music by Kit Hesketh-Harvey) as The Killing Flower.

Let us imagine we are approaching the shore of an unknown island, taking part in an expedition. With great surprise, we recognise that the island is inhabited. Strange-looking but seemingly friendly people step out of the woods; they wave to us and invite us to take part in a big celebration. A ritual is being performed in our honour with exotic music played on exotic instruments. The unfamiliar sounds accompany a narrative that we cannot fully grasp. Two men are fighting; the winner spares the life of the loser. Then, in Act Two, a woman enters the scene: she seems to have lost a goat from her herd, she argues with a guy who is deaf and cannot help her; all of a sudden there is a big party going on and everyone is cheering happily. We are left stunned by the mysterious performance, by its energy and physicality, by the impact of its sounds and rhythms.