There is no more apposite coalescence between Ronald Stevenson the musician and Hugh MacDiarmid the poet than in those lines (a lyric from the long philosophical poem-sequence To Circumjack Cencrastus), which Stevenson set around 1975 as The Song of the Nightingale. There are few singers in today's world, even though there is much left to sing about. But the singer – if he can be found – is of necessity a solitary: an individual (nay an individualist) whose pipings, heard perhaps in Eden, are now all too often swamped in the chaotic noise of what passes in so many areas, not least in music (where noise is at least a concomitant) as the hallmark of progress.

In a review of the first performance of James Clapperton's The Parliament of four Futtit Beistis, Jonathan Cross described the work's ‘blatant but effective modality’ as being ‘evidently an aspect of Clapperton's self-realignment with his Scottish roots’, and concluded, ‘whatever its origins, the end result is more effective than anything of his I have previously heard’.

The Icelandic composer Haflidi Hallgrímsson has lived in Edinburgh since 1977.

Never to be forgotten: my first meeting with Haflidi Hallgrimsson's music. In 1987 at the Edinburgh Festival the astonishing Helsinki Junior Strings (astonishing because they execute each note as if their lives were at stake) with conductor Géza Silvay played Hallgrimsson's Daydreams in Numbers. Here was a unique aural imagination and intensity of transforming workmanship. Music which stretched its virtuosic young performers to their limits but which was immediately accessible. Physically exciting music, incorporating folkloric elements yet entirely unnostalgic: purged, unsentimental, full of Northern lights and colours of all temperatures. The lullaby was sung at the glacier, the winged horse rose from the sea. These pieces breathed the fresh ‘air of other planets’. They moved in fluid dreamtime: utterly strange, entirely new, yet paradoxically familiar and friendly.

David Horne is one of the most interesting – and so far under-rated – Scottish composers writing today. Since 1989 he has based himself in Philadelphia, which has inevitably led to lack of exposure here. On the other hand, his departure from the British contemporary music ‘scene’, may in some ways have secured the creative development of a very special talent. The British musical establishment suffers from occasional bouts of the Paul Gascoigne syndrome: a promising young talent is fussed over, exploited, drained and then abandoned. Home has not only avoided this, but also planted a flag of independence and distance, which may be no bad thing.

‘Rise to birth with me now, my brother …’

William Sweeney's most extended work to date is also his best-known, thanks to its having been broadcast three times. Most recently, and appropriately, his 70-minute setting of Hugh MacDiarmid's epic A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was heard on Radio 3 on Hogmanay. What better moment than the gateway of the New Year for Sweeney's musical gallimaufry, which in its rich diversity and mixture of song and speech, not to mention musical styles, is a faithful tribute to the poem it sets? In a sense, Sweeney's setting repays a very old debt. For it was the voice of Hugh MacDiarmid, lecturing in East London in 1974, that ‘put things together’ in the mind of a 24-year-old ex-avantgarde composer-clarinettist not quite sure what direction he wanted to follow. MacDiarmid's London lecture suddenly brought back to Sweeney an essential but hitherto unrecognized element in his own psyche: the revived folksong-movement of his leftwing Glaswegian childhood, spear-headed by the late Norman Buchan M.P. At Knightswood Secondary School, Sweeney had become fascinated first by contemporary jazz – Davis, Coltrane, Evans – and then Stockhausen (‘via Schoenberg’), and his principal study had been clarinet, continued at the RSAMD, and – from 1970 – at the RAM in London with the redoubtable Alan Hacker. Yet as a child, Sweeney had particularly loved the unaccompanied singing of Archie Fisher's sister Rae, and significantly, he ‘always felt disappointed when the guitars came in and spoiled it’.

• Maxwell Davies's Strathclydes 5 and 6 John Warnaby

• Macmillan, Stevenson and other Scots Calum MacDonald

• Holloway's Second Concerto Michael Gorodecki

• Bill Hopkins on NMC Patrick Ozzard-Low

• Honegger, Busch and Schoeck Peter Palmer

• British Music Label Martin Anderson

• Vagn Holmboe String Quartets Guy Rickards

• Kagel on Disques Montaigne Antony Bye

• … and more Kagel Nicolas Hodges

• Josef Holbrooke on Marco Polo Peter Reynolds

• Shostakovich to Lourié Calum MacDonald

• Alan Hovhaness Bret Johnson

• John Cage: More books and discs Nicolas Hodges

• Peter Schat's ‘The Tone Clock’ Malcolm Miller

• A Swiss Composer Encyclopedia Martin Anderson

• 1993 Gaudeamus Festival Robin Freeman

• 1993 Huddersfield Festival David Power

• Etcetera Ensemble Ian Pace

• William Sweeney's ‘an seachnachd’ Neil Mackay