This article discusses responses to the survey-score Where are we Going? and What have we Done?, which sets out to explore how Anglophone composers choose to ground the impacts of their compositional practice. The composers’ responses primarily centred around the psychosocial impacts of composition, and the article unpicks some of the implications of this focus. The article then details the effect the survey-score had on my own composing, before outlining the affordances of narrative approaches to the act of scoring, and their ability to shine a brighter light on the impacts of our practice, both retrospectively and also with regards to future performances.

Elliott Carter's programme notes for his String Quartet No. 5 describe it as being about the embodiment of human interaction within the rehearsal process. This article develops this concept, evaluating the musical figures that are foreshadowed by the fragments that Carter suggests are rehearsal outtakes. Certain motives are reiterated and developed through slight variations, thus exemplifying the rehearsal process, and perhaps the editorial process, in detail. Interactions within this model are suggestive of the character types that Carter has delineated in his previous string quartets, notably No. 2. Using the Practice Session model also alludes to the real-life circumstances of the preparation of previous quartets by ensembles, and anecdotes about the Juilliard Quartet's rehearsals for the premiere of the String Quartet No. 3 can enhance a narratological understanding of the No. 5's construction. Finally, String Quartet No. 5 is considered as an example of one of the transitional works that initiate Carter's late style and its consolidation of material; its use of all-interval chords, their subsets and supersets reflects the constructive elements of human interaction that Carter has stressed as a principal thematic element.

This article investigates the prolific deployment of images in Pascal Dusapin's scores of the mid to late 1990s. Using Edwin Gordon's concept of ‘audiation’ and Siglind Bruhn's concept of ‘musical ekphrasis’, as well as Neal Curtis’ ideas on the agency and liveness of images, interdisciplinary interpretations of three Dusapin works are offered, using the score image as the main analytical starting point. Beginning with his Piano Études and Loop, these analyses will demonstrate how the score images, derived from the study of ‘catastrophe theory’, prefigure the control of various musical parameters relating to the relationship of variables in this mathematical concept and its forms. An analysis of String Quartet No. 4, notable for its use of both a score image (of a machine) and textual quotation (from Samuel Beckett's Murphy), will then demonstrate how the visual can interact with the verbal to construct a plurality of musical metaphors. The article concludes by positing that Dusapin's elusiveness on the role and function of the images within his work could amount to what W. T. J. Mitchell describes as ‘ekphrastic fear’: an anxiety that the composer's success amalgamating image and music might have broken down the ontological boundary between them.

In her two recent operas, Heart Chamber (2017–19) and Infinite Now (2015–16), Chaya Czernowin uses vocal ensembles to embody a single character. In a 2016 article, she explained that she wanted to liberate the individual voice from its fixed emotional, social and individual conventions (especially its ingrained pathos), and to work with the voice as a free imaginative sonic material, using the ensemble technique to achieve this. This article argues that the voice ensemble technique amplifies and intensifies the pathos of the voice rather than eliminating it. Recognising that the voice has strong somatic qualities since it is produced in the body, I suggest a material-musical analysis, based on the theories of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Brian Massumi, that focuses on the body, the sensual experience and the physical space, and rejects the hermeneutic tradition that refers to meaning and interpretation only. What emerges is that the voices, instrumentation and electronics of the ensemble are designed to embody the inner body and the outer space at the same time. The voice ensemble may split and produce multi-layered mental–physical states, and express how traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, body/mind and subject/object, can meld into multi-perspective processual movements. It is in this intersection of sound and drama, manifesting the corporeal, that the unique power of opera is evinced.

This article provides an overview of compositional practices that invoke representations of the human voice by acoustic means, without the presence of actual human speakers, and, in identifying the limitations and deficiencies of extant practice, proposes a new method or methodological basis for achieving the same phenomenon, to different ends. Clarence Barlow's seminal synthrumentation method forms a central point of discussion; when considered alongside the work of, among others, Mayuzumi, Grisey and Ablinger, it becomes clear that, in existing synthrumental (or instrumental synthesis) practices, the innate inharmonic components of target material for reproduction have largely been discarded or overlooked. After a brief overview of the basic linguistic and perceptual features of speech, a new method designed to evoke whispered speech, with inharmonicity in mind, is demonstrated.