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.

Jörg Widmann's work embraces everything music history – and beyond – has to offer: Lachenmann, Boulez, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke's Late Sonnets and the Screaming Pope paintings of Francis Bacon. His transformative re-imagining of traditional forms is seen nowhere better than in the Jagdquartett, the third in a cycle of five quartets that comprise the core of his œuvre. In the interview around which this article is based he discusses the Jagdquartett and its inspirations in detail, and the possibility of his music representing a kind of meta-modernism.

Jazz was a product of the confrontation of two worlds. The African Negro, transported in slavery, took with him to his new land his native musical traditions, which were corporeally rhythmic and vocally modal; and these came into contact—and before long into conflict—with the harmonic conventions of the West (specifically those of the march and hymn). Out of this tension was generated the classic form of the blues, the traditional basis of jazz. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the black man in America created a music that expressed not only his powerful protest against dispossession, but also a nostalgia for ‘the beauty of his wild forebears’; and (which was more remarkable) the white man too came to recognize in the black man's music a vitality and spontaneity which he, in his modern self-consciousness, had lost.

A critique of politically engaged art is that gallery-dwellers, concert-goers and theatre-lovers share the same political inclination as the artists. Often known as ‘preaching to the choir’, the critique holds that art's power to challenge and persuade is rendered valueless when it is experienced only by people who already hold the same (typically leftist) ideas. In this article I suggest three distinct yet interconnected responses to this critique: namely, ‘expanding’, ‘galvanising’ and ‘activating’ the choir. In the first part I explore ‘expanding’ and ‘galvanising’ through works by Stefan Prins, Sarah Nicolls, Pamela Z and Soosan Lolavar. In the second half I discuss how I ‘activate’ the choir in my own work.

Creating new works combining live musicians with new technologies provides both opportunities and challenges. The Cyborg Soloists research project has commissioned and managed the creation of 46 new works of this type, assembling teams of composers, performers, researchers and technology partners from industry. The majority of these collaborations have been smooth-running and fruitful, but a few have demonstrated complications. This article critically evaluates collaborative methods and methodologies used in the project so far, presenting five case studies involving different types of collaborative work, and exploring the range of professional relationships, the need for different types of expertise within the team and the way technology can act as both a creative catalyst and a source of creative resistance. The conclusions are intended as a toolkit – pragmatic guidelines to inform future practice – and are aimed at artists, technological collaborators, and commissioners and organisations who facilitate these types of creative collaborations.

The decades immediately following World War II constituted a flourishing period of musical innovation on the international scene, encompassing a considerable range of stylistic orientations and techniques. Exploration that led to genuinely innovative compositional practices involving relationships among melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre reached fruition by the mid-1980s. Accordingly, the challenge to composers who emerged during this latter period was twofold: to develop personal styles through a discriminating selection from this large heritage of techniques and stylistic resources – and, in the process, to avoid imitating composers who had used them earlier. In countries not dominated by any particular compositional doctrine – most notably the United States, Great Britain and the Nordic countries – important composers emerged as consolidators who combined and synthesized these resources in a fresh and individual manner. One who has responded most successfully to this challenge is Finland's Magnus Lindberg.

The composer Vladimir Vogel was born in Moscow in 1896. His mother was Russian, his father a businessman who came from Dresden. After the end of the First World War Vogel went to Berlin where he was admitted to Ferruccio Busoni's masterclass, along with Kurt Weill. His studies completed, his career was at first extremely promising, but it came to an abrupt halt with the relinquishing of power to the National Socialists. In jeopardy on three counts, as a Communist, a Jew and a so-called Neutöner or ‘new-note composer’, Vogel roamed Europe for a number of years. Finally he found a refuge in Switzerland, where he produced new compositions until the end of his life without managing to emulate his own early success. He died in Zurich in 1984.

During a visit to Scotland in 1970, I went for a holiday to Orkney: really just to see the things that everybody goes to see, such as the prehistoric stone circle remains and above all the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall—which, apart from being an extraordinary architectural monument, has musical associations. Those of us who have done music at university are familiar with the 12th-Century ‘Hymn to St. Magnus’, which was composed for that building. And so I went there and it was rainy and rather grim; but that you expect and put up with.

In Israel, music is a vital, living, breathing, pulsating, throbbing, inspiring and devotional part of the lives of the people. In Israel, music seems to fulfil so much of the emotional and spiritual needs of the people, that to the outside observer, the avidity and passion with which it is absorbed, (almost visibly chewed and swallowed) makes it virtually akin to the primal hungers of man.

Composer George Rochberg (b. 1918) is the pivot point around which American music took a decisive turn away from Arnold Schoenberg's systematized dissonance, generally known as 12–tone or serial music, and back toward tonality. If it is now safe to return to the concert halls, it is largely because of him. Before turning against 12–tone music in the mid–1960s, Rochberg had been one of its most adept and prestigious practitioners. Thus his ‘conversion’ provoked an outraged reaction from the musical establishment and the avant-garde. However, Rochberg's courage helped to free the next generation of composers from the serial straightjacket to write music that was once again comprehensible to audiences. On a two–CD set, New World Records has re-released recordings of Rochberg's Quartets Nos.3–6, brilliantly performed by the Concord String Quartet (New World Records 80551–2). These works, especially the Third Quartet, were very much at the heart of the controversy caused by Rochberg's attempt to ‘regain contact with the tradition and means of the past’. At his home in Pennsylvania, I spoke with Maestro Rochberg about what is at stake in modern music and about his own extraordinary spiritual and musical journey.

Leonid Desyatnikov is one of the most successful Russian composers of his generation and one of the most distinctive and individual on the contemporary Russian scene. He represents a rare instance of a contemporary composer in his mid-forties who has had all his works performed, some of them on many occasions. In the West, his music has been played by the Deutsche Sym-phony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His vocal cycle Five poems by F. Tyutchev has been performed recently in London and Aldeburgh. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Gidon Kremer became the main champion of Desyatnikov's music; he has commissioned, performed and recorded a number of Desyatnikov's original works as well as his arrangements of Astor Piazzolla's music. To date, Kremer has performed Desyatnikov's Russian Seasons, for violin, female voice and string orchestra, composed in 2000, fifteen times in Europe, the Baltic countries and Russia. On 1 May 2002, he will present its American premiére at Carnegie Hall. The fact that Kremer, who earlier brought the music of such composers as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina to international attent ion, has now ‘chosen’ Desyatnikov speaks volumes for the quality of the music.

Like many friends of Kodály, I find myself having to grapple with a sense of being stricken beyond comfort, and a warring disbelief that he is dead at all. Scattered all over the world is a body of people who have felt the personal magnetism of this extraordinary man, and whose lives have been radically changed as a result. Mátyás Seiber eloquently described the ‘peculiar, suggestive, compelling force that issues from him’, and how his teaching was invested with a touch of Buddhism, which forced his pupils to redeem themselves. That power is no less operative now that he is dead; it is if anything intensified, and people who have been aware of his standards find themselves impelled to take up the challenge that they represent.

In teaching Mikrokosmos to some four score children over a period of several years, I have realized that it serves numerous musical purposes beyond just that of being another series of pieces and studies for pupils. In addition to laying a strong and richly varied foundation for the understanding and performance of twentieth-century music, it presents almost unending varieties of situations for facilitating sight-reading and transposition. The work offers virtually every pianistic and musical problem to the student, and interestingly enough, its use gives him increased insight into music of the past as well as of the present.

The Webern Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung inBasel holds a fair copy of an early version of theDrei Stücke für Streichquartett(1913), comprising the song ‘Schmerz, immer Blicknach über’ together with what later became numbers 1and 6 of the Sechs Bagatellen op.9.This document is highly interesting on many counts:here I will mainly discuss one, the existence of adiscarded ending to the third piece (later op.9no.6). This passage is heavily blacked-out in mauvepencil in the manuscript, but the notes, dynamicsand indications can be discerned with a strong lightand magnifying glass.

Gerhard's first ballet-score, Ariel, came about in 1934 as a result of a meeting between the composer and Leonid Massine which had been engineered by Antal Dorati—though, in the event, Massine rejected the music for ballet purposes as ‘too symphonic’. Two years later, Dorati was the catalyst for a second time when he suggested to Colonel de Basil (for whose company he was then conducting) that Gerhard would be a suitable composer for a Spanish ballet. Wishing to hear some of Gerhard's work, de Basil visited him one evening in Barcelona with Massine and the lead dancer of his company, and Gerhard improvised various pieces in appropriate style for them at the piano. His friend the poet Ventura Gassol—Minister of Fine Arts in the Catalan Government—was also present, at Gerhard's request, to lend moral support. After Gerhard's rendition, the talk turned to possible Spanish subjects for a ballet and the desirability of incorporating traditional Spanish styles of dancing into the choreography; and Gassol proposed an expedition by car to the town of Berga, in the Pyrenees, to see—as a fine illustration of what they were discussing—the ancient folk festivities of ‘Saint John's Fire’ which would be in progress that night.

As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.

Hans Pfitzner was born in 1869 in Moscow—where his parents were temporarily residing—and is sometimes described as a German-Russian composer, although in fact he had no Russian blood. He grew up in Frankfurt o/M, where his father was Musikdirektor at the Municipal Theatre. From him he had his first music lessons, and perhaps the environment helped foster his interest in opera and music for the stage. He studied piano with James Kwast and composition with Ivan Knorr—the teacher of Cyril Scott and Percy Grainger—at Hoch's Conservatoire in Frankfurt. After finishing there, he took up the first in a series of teaching and conducting appointments which lasted until the advent of Hitler in 1933. These included a period as Director of Strasbourg Conservatoire, conductorship of the Kaim Orchestra in Munich, and frequent appearances as conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he also made very notable recordings, especially of the Beethoven symphonies—performances which rank with the finest I have ever heard. Strasbourg University honoured him in 1913 with the degree of Ph.D., and in the same year he was married—in Canterbury, Kent, to which city he and his bride had fled to avoid unpleasant entanglement with Percy Grainger, who considered himself a suitor for the same girl's hand.

Aaron Copland was an urban American Jew of Russian extraction born – as he memorably remarked –

on November 14 1900 on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab. It had none of the garish colour of the ghetto, none of the charm of an old New England thoroughfare, or even a pioneer street. It fills me with mild wonder every time I realize that a musician was born on that street. Music was the last thing anyone would ever have connected with that street. In fact, no one ever had connected music with my family or that street. The idea was entirely original with me.

CECILIA MCDOWALL: Seraphim; Dance the dark streets; Dancing fish; Not Just a Place; Dream City; The case of the unanswered wire. Kathryn Thomas (fl), Catriona Scott (cl), Suzanne Willison (hp), Tippett Quartet, Orchestra Nova c. George Vass. DUTTON Epoch CDLX 7159