This article is the most comprehensive survey to date of the output of David Blake. Although, for reasons of space, it cannot be all-inclusive, every effort has been made to reflect the breadth and depth of a corpus the scale and diversity of which demands attention. In order to chart effectively the composer's development and illustrate how his achievement in one particular medium has impacted upon contemporary and subsequent works in other fields, a broadly chronological approach has been adopted.

John Cage's music was little known in the Soviet Union until the late 1960s, as official communist cultural policy would not allow his music to be performed or researched. This makes it all the more surprising that the only visit by the composer to Soviet Russia had become possible by 1988. The Soviet officials were planning a large festival of contemporary music in St Petersburg in 1988. With the changing climate Tikhon Khrennikov, the secretary of the All Soviet Union League of Composers, appointed by Stalin in 1948, was keen to be seen as a progressive at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika, and he approved the invitation for Cage to be present at the performances of his works in St Petersburg. This article includes interviews with the composer conducted by the author in 1987–1989, as well as recollections of the meetings with Cage at his home in New York City and in Moscow.

Michael Tippett called T.S. Eliot his ‘spiritual and artistic mentor’, but the relationship between the two men has never been studied in detail. Eliot's numerous discussions with Tippett in the 1930s proved a lasting influence on the composer's beliefs about the coming-together of words and music. This article has three aims: first, to use Tippett's correspondence and writings to bring together the most accurate and complete biographical description of the relationship to date; second, to show that Tippett quoted from and alluded to the work of T.S. Eliot not only in his early pieces (as has hitherto been thought) but in much later compositions such as The Ice Break, The Mask of Time, and Byzantium; and third, to examine the libretto of Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time in the light of the composer's talks with Eliot. This article suggests that the inclusion in the oratorio of Negro spirituals was influenced by Eliot, and provides an analysis of the composer's own libretto through the lens of T.S. Eliot's essay ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’. Eliot's essay examines the number of voices in which the ‘I’ of a poem can speak, freed from the specificities of prose, and this article argues that Tippett, influenced by Eliot, harnessed the form of oratorio, freed from the specificities of opera, to allow it to speak in many voices.

This paper examines the sketches for Henri Dutilleux's Symphony No. 2, Le Double, held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel. The material is described in more detail than has been attempted hitherto, testing and challenging some previous statements and conclusions. It also reveals sketches that have remained hidden, leading to some surprising new facts, including the extent of Dutilleux's indecision regarding Le Double's instrumentation and his struggle to compose part of the second movement, as well as an early sketch for a different opening to the work. It seeks, finally, to show how some of the newly discovered material has implications for how we view the finished composition.

Edgard Varèse's Ionisation was a groundbreaking composition that presented unique ideas and problems concerning percussion orchestration. This article examines correspondence between Varèse and Nicolas Slonimsky about the tarole – a snare drum used in the work. In one letter Varèse sketched this instrument in order to show its relationship with a more common orchestral snare drum of the period. This information provides insight into performance practice and the orchestral conception of the work.

The American public has been left in an odd position for the past few years in terms of the War on Terror. As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan slowly trickle away our news outlets have lost interest in calculating the statistics of death, and we have become complacent and apathetic. The greatest fallacy in our vision of war is that wars have an end, when in reality war has never ended, but rather switched conflicts, like influenza. War will never end as long as natural human short-sightedness remains intact. Large-scale global communication may help in ending the threat of war, as new moral conflicts arise once we realize we can have a face-to-face conversation with a colleague on the other side of the world. Rodney Lister's Friendly Fire, premièred at Boston's Longy School of Music this past May in the coincidental wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, is a wide-ranging and harrowing plea for pacifism in the face of apathy. However, its performance by Charles Blandy and Collage New Music may betray its cause, meeting terror with tenuousness.

In Benjamin Britten's centenary year, the music of its founding father featured widely at the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival. However, there was also a strong showing of music by contemporary composers, including six new pieces for different ensembles co-commissioned by the Britten–Pears Foundation and the Royal Philharmonic Society to mark the bicentenary of the foundation of the RPS, as well as Britten's hundredth anniversary.

Since 1992, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival (founded in 1969 by composer John Metcalf) has focused exclusively on living composers, aiming to reach a wider audience than that traditionally associated with new music. In Metcalf's words: ‘We're not here for … the new music profession; of course, composers, ensembles and publishers are an important part of our audience, but … new music needs to go beyond that now’. However, Vale programmes do not lack challenge or stylistic diversity; alongside more recognized figures, the Festival showcases hitherto little-known composers and explores a variety of music from smaller countries and/or younger traditions. Premières are a key feature of the programming. This year, the Festival was extended to run from 9–18 May, adding a second concert to the customary single contribution from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Across a range of platforms, there were 19 premières of music by 10 composers. The following offers some of the highlights.

Premièred at the Bridgewater Hall on 23 May, Near Midnight, by the Hallé's new Associate Composer Helen Grime (born 1981) is scored for large orchestra including celeste and five percussionists. The work opened in the lowest registers for harp and double basses, with quiet undulations including trills, and bells. These dark and deep sounds formed the background to a crescendo built out of accumulating upward scales. The opening patterns developed a swirling motion that gave rise, after about two minutes, to vaguely mechanistic ostinato-like figurations underpinned by deep pedals – providing the backdrop to various intermittent solos, including flute.

Contemporary music ensemble Psappha gave three world premières in a concert at the University of Manchester's Cosmo Rodewald Hall on 8 March 2013. Their programme began with first performances of brief works by two young composers connected with the University. I Lost My Way in Dixieland, by Thomas Jarvis (b.1991), was a deftly realized deconstruction and reinvention of a popular jazz style, with a throwaway ending that made an apt parting gesture for a witty and enjoyable pastiche. And Sempadan, by Sayyid Shafiee (b.1987), made effective use of offstage trumpet and trombone interacting with on-stage clarinet, percussion and double bass, to suggest the concept of two different but complementary cultures.

When Gabriel Prokofiev first came to prominence in the UK, comparisons were inevitably made with his famous grandfather. Gabriel has since forged a distinctive musical identity for himself, making the shared name all but irrelevant. But in Russia that name carries even greater significance, so it was little surprise that the world première of Gabriel's Cello Concerto in Saint Petersburg, on 18 May, was in a concert that included at least two Prokofievs. In fact, a third Prokofiev was also featured, as the event began with poetry by Oleg: Gabriel's father and Sergei's son.

Michael van der Aa's multi-medium opera Sunken Garden had its world première in seven performances in the Barbican Theatre, borrowed for the purpose from the English National Opera, in the second half of April; I went late in the run, encouraged by the reviews of the opening nights by my confrères and -sœurs, who were all-a-quiver at the use of 3-D projection in the production – but it's not the first time I've wondered if I'd been in the same place as other reviewers: I was bored to tears and, having given it an optimistic hour's grace to establish its pace and purpose, spent the remaining hour waiting for it to come to an end.

Deirdre Gribbin's piano concerto, The Binding of the Years, written between 2009 and 2012, was given its UK première by soloist Finghin Collins with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Alan Buribayev at a Maida Vale Studio concert on 15 March. Its evocative title refers to the gathering and securing of 52 reeds that symbolized the old years in Aztec culture; that civilization's rituals connected with fire and time form part of the inspiration behind Gribbin's new work.

In my recent review of a Col Legno disc of music by Luke Bedford (born 1978), I described this composer as ‘a major voice’. That disc included the piece Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale, for solo violin, solo viola and 11 players (2011); this concert by the London Sinfonietta under Sian Edwards began with a reworking for 10 players and no soloists, hence its new title, Wonderful No-Headed Nightingale (the heads are lost but the bird sings on). This was the UK première of the revision. In absentia soloists, strangely, the lines seemed even more expressive. Perhaps it was the rather small space of the South Bank's Purcell Room, but climaxes tended towards overwhelming; the use of quartertones seemed emphasized by acoustics, also.

Born in Vermont in 1981, and raised in Rhode Island, then based in New York, the young post-minimalist composer Nico Muhly was, at the age of 20, commissioned by the Juilliard School to write Music in Transition for versatile pianist Bruce Brubaker. Later Brubaker and Muhly created a performance piece ‘involving electronic commentaries and “graffiti” overlaid on live performances of piano sonatas by Haydn’, to quote the Kings Place programme notes for Muhly's new piece Drones and Piano, which received its UK première on 19 May, with Brubaker at the keyboard. Again fragments of Haydn are used, ‘as well as lexia from John Adams’ Phrygian Gates, Janáček, … along with the eighth hymn by Thomas Tallis'.

The music of Shostakovich's abandoned opera Orango wasn't itself such a surprise: the première, given in Los Angeles in December 2011, was recorded live and released soon after on a Deutsche Grammophon CD (0289 479 0249 2). But experiencing it in the flesh – at its European première in the Royal Festival Hall on 16 May – revealed the music all over again and left at least this listener slack-jawed in astonishment at the profligacy of Shostakovich's genius.

Philip Moore, Organist Emeritus of York Minster was one of the main featured composers at this year's London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, now in its twelfth consecutive year. A week of concerts and services at St Pancras Church in London showcases a number of new works, and this year saw new choral pieces by Gordon Crosse, Diana Burrell and Ed Hughes (whose Chaconne for organ was composed in memory of Jonathan Harvey, who died on 4 December 2012 at the age of 73). The Festival also marked Robin Holloway's 70th birthday, with a concert of his choral works on 17 May.

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy prevented the New York-based JACK quartet from crossing the Atlantic to join forces with the Arditti Quartet in the UK première of James Clarke's 2012-S. So the belated first performance within these shores of Clarke's new piece for two string quartets, which took place at a Wigmore Hall recital on 6 May 2013, had been much anticipated.

This new opera, premièred on 25 May, is based on the book The Firework-Maker's Daughter by the popular British children's author Philip Pullman. Set in ancient China at the time of the emperors, it tells the story of a widowed firework maker (baritone Wyn Pencarreg) struggling to bring up Lila (soprano Mary Bevan), his only daughter, who (against his wishes) has ambitions to follow his line of work. This seemed an apt tale to convert into an opera, even one ostensibly for children, given the relative simplicity of the outline plot. However, one of the difficulties was obviously going to be to depict the various quests Lila undertakes as she attempts to prove her worthiness to follow her father into the family profession. These potential pitfalls were solved by skilful stagecraft.