In the early 1920s and 30s a strange electronic instrument found its way from Russia into some of the more fashionable ballrooms, night clubs, and concert halls in Europe and America. This exotic new invention, called the ‘theremin’ or ‘thereminvox’, caused a considerable stir. Part of the interest was its unusual sound (like a musical saw mated with a light soprano), but its most dramatic feature was that the performer never actually touched the instrument. He or she simply waved graceful hands near the two antennae (one set vertically, the other looped horizontally) to coax out seamless, melifluous melodies. The proximity of the right hand to the vertical antenna changed the ultrasonic electromagnetic field, thus changing the pitch over about a six-octave range. The left hand (or sometimes a foot pedal) controlled the volume. By gently shaking the right hand at the antenna a vibrato could be achieved, giving performances a little more musical (not to mention choreographic) interest. Fashionable women dressed in long gowns seemed to be favourite photographic subjects of the period as performers, as well as the inventor himself, poised ‘playing the rods’ in full dress tails, arms outstretched like a great conductor–or perhaps sorcerer.

The folk view of composition is often that of an isolated, possibly unhinged genius, struggling alone at the piano or desk. However, in this article we will investigate the collaborative aspects of compositional life, showing how such an individualistic model of the composer is both accurate and inaccurate, and how this paradox is played out in current attempts to valorize collaborative work in composition. Although we intend some of the observations and conclusions from this article to generalize, we are fully aware that such a case-study can only really be illustrative and provocative. Given that this is the case we will finish by attempting to make some general points about the aesthetic and social contradictions which this study has brought to light. Our concern in this article is more prospective than retrospective: although we will refer to some historical data, we aim to reflect mainly on contemporary compositional practice in the West, and particularly the UK.

Composers in academic institutions are increasingly required to describe their activities in terms of ‘research’ – formulating ‘research questions’, ‘research narratives’, ‘aims’ and ‘outcomes’. Research plans and funding applications require one to specify the nature of the original contribution that will be made by a piece of music, even before it is composed. These requirements lead to an emphasis on collaborative work, technology and superficial novelty of format. Yet the very idea that musical composition is a form of research is a category error: music is a domain of thought whose cognitive dimension lies in embodiment, revelation or presentation, but not in investigation and description. It is argued here that the idea of composition as research is not only objectively false but inimical to genuine musical originality.

The Passage of Time naturally removes us from first-hand personal experience with significant historical events and/or important persons that were part of those developments. Since the musical aesthetics and techniques of Arnold Schoenberg and his circle originated and began to develop in Vienna over 75 years ago, future students will have to rely on written rather than direct personal sources of information to gain insight into the music of that era. Our loss of primary contact with the Vienna Schoenberg circle is further complicated in that its members generally met and worked in intimate and esoteric situations. These conditions were in large part due to the conservative tastes of the Viennese public, so that new works in all the arts were generally not able to find public support.

1—What follows is notes, made at various stages and on a variety of topics. Few of these remarks make any pretence to completeness, and I have not attempted to fill in the gaps and ‘cover’ any particular field thoroughly. Few of these remarks follow on from one to the next, so they may be read at random.

Perhaps it will be helpful to imagine in what rôles the various remarks are made; whether as composer, listener, interpreter, critic, publicity man, or simply theoretician. I have discussed only those things which concern, or have concerned me directly (and this may be taken as an apology).

This interview was conducted in November 1998 in connexion with a concert in the ‘dal niente’ series at King's College, London. The questions were faxed to Mr Lachenmann in English and he responded with written answers in German. A German-language version of the interview was published in the May 1999 issue of the Swiss contemporary music magazine Dissonanz, with however an important omission in the text of Lachenmann's first answer which is rectified here. I wish to acknowledge David Alberman's assistance with the translation of this English version.

After nearly 40 years of creating recorded electronic music, for the last 10 years Éliane Radigue has created music exclusively in collaboration with performers, using solely oral and aural transmission. Focusing on the details of this ‘scoreless’ working method, this article considers the performer's perspective on Radigue's Occam Ocean (2011–), a series of 22 infinitely combinable solos and over 20 chamber pieces. Through interviews with the performers and Radigue, a composite understanding of their collaboration is reached, focusing on the emergent ideas of virtuosity, memory, images, scores, hospitality and non-hierarchy. A typical transmission and collaboration is described, and a new lens for viewing this method is proposed, the living score. The article concludes with a brief discussion of how Radigue and her collaborators' non-hierarchical model of collaboration may offer an alternative compositional framework.

When János Kárpáti contributed a survey of the younger Hungarian composers to the Spring 1969 issue of TEMPO, it was natural for him to include a paragraph on György Kurtág, even though Kurtág was then 43 and a composer with more than 20 years' working experience. His history at that time was curious. Born in 1926 in Lugoj, a Romanian town acquired from Hungary in the partition following the 1914–18 war, he had moved in 1946 to Budapest, where he submitted to an extended period of study with Sándor Veress and (after Veress's defection in 1949) Ferenc Farkas. According to György Króo's model entry on Kurtág in the New Grove, he gained his composition diploma only in 1955. But throughout this period he was actively composing, and although no definitive or accurate list of these early works is available it appears that they were numerous and, within the conventions of the day, expert. Some of them were published. With the end of the Rákosi era, and in the freer atmosphere which followed the autumn rising of 1956, Kurtág was able to travel to Paris to renew his studies. There he worked with Marianne Stein as well as attending classes of Messiaen and Milhaud. He returned to Budapest in 1958 artistically resurrected, as he himself acknowledged when he labelled the string quartet he completed in 1959 his opusi. But from now on composition, though rescued from unhappy limitations, was to be a laborious and often discouraging business. At the time of Kárpáti's survey Kurtág had finished only seven works, of which the most recent had taken him more than five-and-a-half years to write. Not one of these works had been publicly played in Britain.

This article addresses the phenomenon of New Conceptualism, otherwise known as conceptual music, or Konzeptmusik, and locates it within the German new music scene of the last decade. It is suggested that conceptual music may perhaps be a contradiction in terms, representing a nostalgic desire for the semantic strength of conceptual art. In particular the article focuses on Johannes Kreidler's 2009 work, Fremdarbeit, and scrutinises the composer's claim to have ‘outsourced’ the composition of the work to India and China. The significance of this – whether actual or fictional – as an example of globalisation is examined and set within its political and economic context.

The word ‘Darmstadt’ has come to stand for a broad set of discursive tropes: whether positive or negative, the word is often used as a convenient shorthand for organising ways of thinking about music in the post-war era. I suggest that, after the many symbolic deaths of the avant-garde, the word Darmstadt has come to function, too, as a sort of Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, an idea which need have little to do with the father ‘proper’: rather it is a structuring principle, one which authorises and delimits the boundaries of the known, the prescribed and proscribed world. I argue, too, that the death of that symbolic father, however it becomes extended and perpetuated, surely presages rupture and collapse within the symbolic order. From this position, I examine the ways in which various spectres of Darmstadt – borrowing from Derrida's Marxian hauntologie – return, both within the world of New Music and beyond.

In 1948, Pierre Boulez ended one of his articles thus: ‘I have a horror of dealing in words with what is so prettily called the aesthetic problem. Besides, I don't want to make this article any longer; I prefer to turn back to my MS paper.’

That attitude was to become characteristic of young avant-garde composers in the 1950's. A new world of sonic and temporal experience had been sighted from the standpoint of Webern's serial technique—a world centred on the organization of sound-material. Amid the bustle of striking camp and heading for the new Promised Land, the question of Beauty was not merely out of place; it was downright suspect. For it involved those criteria and taboos, value judgements and ideals, on whose ruins everyone was then standing. And yet—as Boulez's pronouncement show—a belief in the possibility of proceeding (yet again!) from neutral ‘sound-values’ involved a secret dialectic with the aesthetic considerations that had ostensibly been excluded from the discussion.

De-coding Skin: piano works by FELDMAN, XENAKIS, FINNISSY, NEWLAND, WILSON, WHITTY. Philip Howard (pno). The Divine Art 25021.

This article reviews a recent wave of literature on the resurgence of vinyl records, examining what it has claimed about vinyl's capacity for tangibility and the contrast to digital media, associated with intangibility. These claims are explained with reference to other literatures on touch, and it is suggested that vinyl's haptics mediates and embodies the emotionally rewarding production of a sense of self. The apparent contrast of vinyl aesthetics with classical music aesthetics is also discussed, and the presence of contemporary classical music within the vinyl resurgence is considered.

The notion of the Darmstadt School lies at the very heart of any conception of what the Darmstadt New Music courses were, how they functioned and what their purpose was. Arguably, the notion is important, too, in understanding what the Darmstadt New Music Courses still are, even now, a half-century on from the original coining of the term itself.

John Croft's article ‘Composition is not Research’ challenges a conception and ideal of compositional work in academia which has grown in prominence over several decades in the UK. As a performer-scholar, who also writes non-performance-related scholarship, I welcome this challenge, share some of Croft's reservations about the ways in which these conceptions often manifest themselves, and also have concerns about the rushed integration of practitioners into academia and the implications for more traditional forms of scholarship. However, I find many of Croft's formulations and assumptions too narrow, and instead argue that a good deal of the process of composition and performance does constitute research – grappling with difficult questions, exploring solutions, and producing creative work which embodies these solutions and from which others can draw much of value.

This article seeks to clarify the aesthetic precedents for New Conceptualism generally, and Johannes Kreidler's work in particular. Pursuant to this end, I examine how Kreidler's approaches to musical and political material are ideologically indebted to his teacher, Mathias Spahlinger, whose dictum that New Music can be socially relevant without resorting to political clichés is taken by Kreidler into the digital age. Finally, by means of a conclusion, I attempt to provide a broad examination of how Kreidler's aesthetic concerns differ from – and sometimes radically conflict with – those other composers who are grouped under the New Conceptualism letterhead.

The eminent German composer Helmut Lachenmann enjoys an exalted reputation among a small circle of English contemporary music enthusiasts. To the wider English music public, though, he is little known. There are hardly any comprehensive accounts of Lachenmann in English. His consciously elusive compositional style could even be introduced to the English audience as ‘old-guard avantgarde’ without being challenged at all.

There is an uncanny symmetry in the life of the French–Canadian composer Claude Vivier: we do not know the exact time or circumstances of his birth, and we do not know the exact time or circumstances of his death. The first of these two facts haunted Vivier all his life. Born to unknown parents in Montreal in April 1948 and placed in an orphanage, he became obsessed with the identity of his birth mother, whom he never knew. Several of his compositions can be heard as a poignant attempt to communicate with her. The second fact – his murder in March 1983 by a young Parisian criminal in circumstances that remain not fully investigated – has, you might say, haunted the posthumous reputation of his music. It seems impossible to discuss Vivier's work without mentioning the cruel and sordid circumstances of his death. For some, his murder is the key to an understanding of his life and – even more controversially – of his work.

Over the past two decades significant changes in approaches to gender equity have taken place in the fields of contemporary music and music research. However, women in music are still disadvantaged in terms of income, inclusion and professional opportunities. In Australia a national approach to improving gender equity in music has begun to emerge as once-controversial strategies trialled by four tertiary institutions have become established practices. This article discusses successful inclusion strategies for women in music, including the commitment to gender-balanced programming across all concerts at Queensland Conservatorium of Music by 2025, the introduction of mandatory quotas in recital programmes at Monash University, mentoring programmes for women composers at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and the development of coursework devoted to women in music at The University of Western Australia, as well as other initiatives that have emerged from them, both within and beyond the institution. Each approach is examined in the context of broader global discussions around gender and feminism. The public willingness to engage in discussions over sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination in the workplace that has resulted from the #MeToo movement is cited as key in influencing the engagement of students and professionals with these strategies and subsequent influence on performance practices, project development and presentational formats in new music.

The composers belonging to what would later be called the ‘spectral music movement’ started their careers in an unstable political period in France. Between 1962 and 1974, under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, France (the 5th Republic) was what we can call a ‘Gaullist Republic’. But in the middle of the 1960s the economic policy of the government aroused the hostility of the French people. The ‘Stabilization Plan’ of 1963 induced unemployment for the first time since 1945, and the authoritarian character of a government which, in 1967, legislated in the form of ordonnances, turned the people against the presidential policy in every domain.