SALLINEN: The Palace Rhapsody, op. 72.1 AHO: Tristia.1 RAUTAVAARA: A Soldier's Mass, op. 40.2 KANTELINEN: Ghosts.2 The Guards' Band c. 1Elias Seppälä, 2Raine Ampuja. Alba ABCD 170.

The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

‘I haven't heard my piece yet, none of us have’, confided thirtysomething composer Will Todd as he arrived to take his place in the audience at the Purcell Room on 13 July. He spoke as one of the twenty British composers, all alive and well, commissioned by artists Alison Smart (soprano) and Katharine Durran (piano) to set a French poem for them to perform. Unusually, the composers had to submit their scores as if ‘tablets from on high’, without rehearsal input. Although this worked well as they all entered into the spirit, and the artists seemed particularly adept at interpretation over a wide range of genres – from Graham Fitkin's mimimalist-style ‘Les Aliments Blancs’ (Satie: ‘je ne mange que des aliments blancs’), to John Casken's impressionistic ‘Colloque Sentimental’, with its shades of Debussy – having such a swift succession of 20 short ‘soundbites’ made for a rather over intense programme overall. Perhaps, on another occasion, a concentration on no more than ten composers, would allow for rehearsal time with each to assist in conveying more in-depth interpretation of the text, and give the audience more time to absorb each contribution.

This analysis of Helmut Lachenmann's Salut für Caudwell (1977) for guitar duet is intended to add to the small amount of English literature that directly examines Lachenmann's music. A description of Salut's construction is offered, decrypting the extended techniques employed and outlining the work's formal design. The concept of ‘musical ruins’, namely degenerative yet familiar material, is deployed as a means to discuss specific moments of the music, and it will be demonstrated that moments of ‘musical ruin’ are inherently linked to aspects of instrumental technique as well as the musical form, making them critical to the reception of Salut. Other analyses of Lachenmann's work are used as methodological models and comparisons, providing a framework within which to examine unfamiliar musical territory, and placing Salut within the repertory of Lachenmann's more thoroughly documented music.

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.

• London, Royal Opera House: ‘Promised End’ Tim Mottershead

• Amsterdam: Raskatov's ‘A Dog's Heart’ Alexander Ivashkin

• Glasgow: James Dillon's ‘Nine Rivers’ Paul Conway

• Zurich: Dalbavie's ‘Gesualdo’ Peter Palmer

• Tanglewood Festival 2010 Christian Carey

• Manchester: Friedrich Cerha Kaleidoscope Tim Mottershead

• Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2010 Paul Conway

• Further reports from London, Manchester, Birmingham, St Albans Martin Anderson, Jill Barlow, Tim Mottershead, Paul Conway

In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

Picking the chocolate-coated plums – a traditional Polish treat – from the abundance of riches on offer at the 45th annual Warsaw Autumn Festival (20–28 September 2002) sets a delectable challenge. Most of the concerts were packed, and predominantly with young people; its events were held in venues ranging from the elegant National Philharmonic to the sleek Warsaw Stock Exchange; and a typically diverse range of contemporary music, programmed with insight and performed with great commitment, drew enthusiastic – and occasionally enthusiastically critical – responses from the audiences. Indeed, while the plentiful supply of complimentary chocolate bars from sponsors E. Wedel certainly helped sustain energy levels during the nine hectic days of events, the reflexive stylistic juxtapositions created this Autumn's true momentum.

London: Music We'd Like To Hear, March–April 2006

SCHOENBERG: String Quartets Nos.1–4; String Quartet in D major; Presto in C major; Scherzo in F major. Aron Quartet (Ludwig Müller, Barna Kobori, Georg Hamann, Christophe Pantillon) with Anna Maria Pammer (sop). Preiser Records PR 90572 (3-CD set).

While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context, and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself. This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic music offered as examples.

The above quote, extracted from his L'Opere per Flauto (1977–1990), provides not only a colorful introduction to the effusive imagination of Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, but also a preview of what an unfamiliar listener may expect to find in his music. His largely unchanging musical language has slowly yet deliberately – like the four-minute unbroken cello glissando found near the end of his Vanitas for voice, cello and piano (1981)– captured the attention of composers, performers, scholars, and new music enthusiasts for over 30 years. Moreover, examination of Sciarrino's music provokes consideration for fascinating compositional comparisons, particularly in 20th-century Italian music, as his oeuvre demonstrates similarities with, and advancements of, the music of his compatriots. In this article, we will ‘reconnoiter’ the music of Sciarrino on two different levels, by: 1) contextualizing the formulization of his compositional language from developmental and sociological perspectives, and 2) conceptualizing these investigations in All'Aure in Una Lontananza (1977), a work which would perhaps forecast goals of his life output.

The ‘Nocturne’ from Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) presents a number of interesting melodic and motivic features effectively modelled by aspects of diatonic transformational theories. Following a brief review of important transformational operations in diatonic set theory (transposition within Mod-7 diatonic space, diatonic interval cycles, and ‘signature transformation’), this article presents an analysis of the ‘Nocturne’ drawing upon both traditional and recent developments in diatonic transformational theory. Doing so illustrates an intricate compositional technique, one that traces motivic associations in the vocal line, the horn part and the accompanying strings. A close reading reveals that these motivic techniques stem from the generic concept of echoing and reverberation at the heart of Tennyson's poem.

This reply addresses a number of misunderstandings that have arisen with regard to my argument in ‘Composition is not Research’; notably that it rests on a definition of research derived from ‘scientific method’, and that it somehow entails the view that composers should not be asked to write about their music. It is argued here that referring to composition as ‘research’ is at best a perverse (if institutionally expedient) way of talking about what composers have always done, and at worst leads to a distorted picture of compositional work and musical value.

The oeuvre of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is based upon extreme musical repetition. In his Monadologie series (2007-present), short samples of pre-existing music form the starting point for a variety of automatically generated looping and transformation processes. The overwriting of pre-existing music results in the creation of meta-compositions that radically alter the listeners' understanding of the original piece.

Sketching a general overview of the composer's aesthetic beliefs and the compositional strategies originating from them, this article focuses on Lang's Monadologie series. It aims to clarify the relationships between the individual pieces of the series, to analyse the musical techniques used to reinterpret pre-existing scores within a contemporary setting and, finally, to interpret the implications that arise from that procedure. The 2009 Monadologie VII: …for Arnold… functions as a historico-analytical case study, from which a deeper insight into the series' hermeneutics can be gained.

Varèse Rodney Lister