That both Stravinsky and Krenek composed a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah is not in itself especially startling, for it had been done before and has been done since. In his Conversations Stravinsky says that he was already familiar with Palestrina's complete service, as well as the other Lamentations of Tall is and Byrd. (He does not mention Krenek along with these, but acknowledges him elsewhere.) Stravinsky and Krenek both made selections from the Vulgate of the Lamentations: Stravinsky from chapters I, III, and V and Krenek from those sections which are used at a Catholic service on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Saturday. Both works are structurally tripartite, and both treat the Hebrew letters separately from the text.

Everyone knows that Bartók's compositions were strongly influenced by his work with folk music. For over 70 years commentators have repeated the fact in one form or another. Bartok himself noted shortly before his death: ‘It is almost a truism that contemporary art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis. However, there is much misunderstanding and misinterpretation with reference to the relation between our higher art music and our rural music’. That ‘misunderstanding and misinterpretation’ was not entirely the fault of scholars and critics. Bartók's numerous essays on the subject, written between 1911 and 1944, all too often provide the reader with generalities. Where he is specific it is most usually about thematic, or occasionally harmonic, derivations from folk sources. With the exception of portions of the ‘Harvard Lectures’ (1943), however, Bartók avoids any sustained account of how folk music influenced the modal and tonal structures of his compositions. Above all, he never explains the principles behind his characteristic pitch notations, particularly those double sharps and double flats so frequently found in his scores.

Among the passengers on the ocean liner Provence, as it disembarked from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires on 30 July 1954 at the outset of its 18-day voyage to Marseilles, were members of the theatre company Renaud-Barrault, returning home after a lengthy tour during the course of which it had performed in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. If there was general fatigue at the end of such a gruelling schedule, during which the Company had given over 80 performances, there must have been an accompanying sense of exhilaration, and for perhaps the first time since leaving France on 24 April, an opportunity to relax. (Even the outward journey on Bretagne, the sister ship of Provence, had been taken up with a full schedule of rehearsals for the coming tour.) The joint directors, Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud, as well as the young musical director, Pierre Boulez, joined their colleagues on board Provence a few days later at the Brazilian port of Salvador de Bahia, having opted to return to Brazil for a few days, during which there was an opportunity to witness a candomblé ceremony. For Jean-Louis Barrault, it was evidently a joyous return to the country which was the scene of the Company's first and perhaps greatest triumphs on a tour which had been as successful in every respect as the Company's first visit to South America in 1950.

At 65, Howard Skempton is somewhere near the centre of British compositional life: a surprising development for an avowedly ‘experimental’ composer, whose output until his early forties consisted primarily of short pieces written for himself and a few associates. This annotated interview traces Skempton's career, from the early influences of Webern, Feldman and Britten, through the mentorship of Cornelius Cardew and friendship with Michael Parsons, to the influence of text-setting and of the commissioning process on his recent work. Skempton's preoccupation with ‘the sound’ looms large, but is seen to be balanced by an equal concern with questions of structure, and the interview explores issues of continuity both within individual pieces and across his oeuvre, from A Humming Song (1967) for piano to the string quartet Tendrils (2004), the orchestral song-cycle The Moon is Flashing (2007) and the 35-minute, single-movement viola concerto Only the Sound Remains (2009).

To the world of today, Strawinsky looms a figure shrouded in his own greatness, spiritualized. The incredible virtuosity, the utter precision of his methods of work are in themselves perturbing to the average mind. Scores without a single erasion, where each instrumental part is written in a different-coloured ink; the very array of the ink bottles so as to allow the composer to dip his pen in as unhesitatingly as if to touch the keys of his piano—all this suggests an alchemist in his laboratory rather than a composer in the throes of creative fever. But that it is pure gold produced in this laboratory the world contests not.

For all practical purposes opera in America was, for a long period, a mere luxury product for the few, a social event much more than an artistic undertaking. It had not played any significant part in the spiritual and cultural development of the nation. To Europeans, opera in America meant only the making of as much money as possible in the shortest possible time. To Americans it meant the display of the most precious jewels and the most expensive gowns of a few hundred privileged families at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. And for the rest of the population it meant practically nothing.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate, by examining György Ligeti's cycle of three pieces for double choir, what I call his compromise between temporal forms that possess their own microcosmic history and latent drama, and architectural patterns of his music that are endowed with a purely spatial coherence. I hope to demonstrate that an analysis of the aesthetic concepts at work in Ligeti's pieces might lead to a somewhat non-traditional approach in elaborating analytical strategies of modern music.

Until recently, the music of Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana was largely overlooked in Britain, despite both composers having achieved widespread recognition beyond our shores. In France they have ranked among the leading composers of their generation since at least the 1960s and have received many of the highest official accolades. In Britain, the view of French music since 1945 has often been synonymous with the music of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to the virtual exclusion of others whose work has long been honoured not only in France and elsewhere in Europe but in the wider international arena. These ‘others’ include Dutilleux and Ohana. Developing an innovative and forward-looking approach, independent from the preoccupations of their contemporaries who congregated at Darmstadt, both Dutilleux and Ohana were excluded from representation at the concerts of the Domaine musical. As a result, their music was neglected in Britain throughout the years when the programming policies of Boulez and Sir William Glock were at their most influential. Undoubtedly, Boulez is one of the most phenomenal figures in music of the last 50 or so years and the position of his erstwhile teacher Messiaen is secure as one of the giants of the 20th century. Yet, however significant their respective contribution, Boulez and Messiaen represent only one facet of French music since 1945.

CASELLA: Complete Piano Music. Lya de Barberiis (pno). Warner Fonit 0927 47043-2 (3-CD set).

Arnold Schoenberg, of course, did not write a piano sonata. At any rate, none of his works for piano bears this title. As I have suggested elsewhere, however, sonata form was much in his thoughts as he wrote the piano pieces of opus 23, and one of his last two pieces for solo piano, written five years later, is a sonata movement which should stand as a model of the integration of twelve-note technique and classical form. When Pierre Boulez, in 1952, famously condemned Schoenberg for using the old forms instead of inventing new ones that were derived entirely from serialism, he might have taken just a moment to consider the ways in which the old form is articulated in opus 33a and been ever so slightly more charitable, for in this sonata movement, as in certain pieces of op. 23, themes and sections are defined and distinguished from each other in ways that have meaning only in relation to the twelve-note technique: though the form is an old one, the several parts are defined by reference to possibilities offered by the new method.

The idea and meaning of ‘freedom’ in free improvisation has largely been determined by a masculine subject position. This paper proposes a thinking of free improvisation from a feminist perspective, drawing upon the writings of Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed and Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing, and on our own practices as improvising musicians. Reflecting on our own experiences in music and life, we ask: What does it mean to be a feminist free improviser? What inspires us to seek freedom through our improvisation practices? Can thinking improvisation through the lens of feminist theory inform our improvisational practices? We seek to think improvisation from a collective, inclusive origin. We posit that improvising is always, as Donna Haraway has suggested, ‘making-with’: creating, moment-to-moment, requiring interaction with the environment and its inhabitants. Free improvisation is not free if its practice is delimited by an exclusive world view. ‘Feministing’ free improvisation can challenge assumptions that undermine free improvisation's claim to freedom.

This article examines the techno-philosophical aspects of how we create and understand musical systems in twenty-first century computational media. Arguing that processor-based media have exploded the compositional language of new music, the article proposes a set of concepts that might help us navigate this new space of instrumental possibilities. The term ‘ergodynamics’ – and related concepts – is proposed as a useful concept when describing the phenomenological, historical and aesthetic aspects of musical instruments, as well as a lens for looking at new compositional practices that can be defined as being either ‘idiomatic’ or ‘supra-instrumental’. The article explores the difference in composing for acoustic, electronic and digital instruments, and suggests that new musical practice can be characterised by a move from composing work to inventing systems.

Judith Weir (b.1954) is one of Britain's leading composers. Her three full-length operas (A Night at the Chinese Opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Blond Eckbert) have been widely performed in Britain and abroad. Since the 1990s she has had a fruitful association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its sister group, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). Weir's theatre work includes collaborations with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her interest in community music projects included an innovative spell of six years as the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. Recent works include the orchestral piece The Welcome Arrival of Rain for the Minnesota Orchestra, heard at the Proms in 2002, and the ensemble work The Tiger Under the Table for the London Sinfonietta.

Giacinto Scelsi, last Count of Dayala Valva and one of the most extraordinary composers of this century, died in Rome on 9 August 1988 at the age of 85 in the Policlinico Gemelli after an attack brought on by the sweltering Roman summer: he who never went to the mountains to avoid it, thinking that warmth could do him only good. After the Naples earthquake of 1980, which flattened the mediaeval hill town of Valva and with it the family castle and its library, Scelsi said: crolla il castello, crolla il padrone. The castle falls to bits and so does its master. Those of us who knew him in his last years remember above all the frail figure sitting on a couch below the two portraits that Dali had given the Eluards for a wedding present, doing ironic and at times testy battle with the world and old age, there in his overheated house across from the Roman Forum. With such a view, he used to say, what one does must be quite splendid or else a very bad joke. During his lifetime Scelsi refused to be photographed, did his best to avoid programme notes, and gave information about his life only when he chose to forget himself in conversation. Few of us cared to violate these rules, knowing that for a man who had dictated the mémoires of his future life they represented a kind of defence against a finality imposed from without. He sought something like this in his music as well, hoping it would seem only a snatch of what had been going on long before, of what would be going on long after.

The new music summer school in Darmstadt is perhaps the most important gathering of and performers of contemporary music in Europe. Launched in 1946 in the then American Zone of occupied Germany, as part of the postwar process of internationalization (and, therefore, de-Nazification) of German culture, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse quickly gained a reputation as a forum for the promulgation of a radically abstract musical aesthetic, based on reductive analyses of the serial works of Webern in particular. While some composers saw this new aesthetic as a ‘mechanistic heresy’, the music of what came to be known as the Darmstadt School – Boulez, Maderna, Nono, Stockhausen – soon attracted official support since, like Abstract Expressionist painting, ‘a seemingly abstract art could readily be elevated as an emblem of “terrible freedom”’. This ‘terrible freedom’, the freedom to be unpopular, was a potent symbol of Western individualism in the symbolic battle that characterized the European theatre of the Cold War during the 1950s.

Broadcasting in the United States is a business—and a very big one. Radio stations are privately owned and are operated for profit. Broadcasting is just as much a business as is running a theatre on Br adway or making a picture in Hollywood. The state and the government have nothing to do with it. To be sure, the Federal Communications Commission in Washington lays down certain rules of operations, and controls and allots wavelengths to the various networks and stations. But after the F.C.C. has given you a licence and a wavelength, and as long as you comply with their rules and conduct yourself accordingly, you can buy a piece of ground to-morrow, build a station and go into the radio business. And it is a good business to be in.

Two of the most important goals for music composition during the past century were innovation and originality. In reaching for these goals, many composers abandoned tonal protocol, looking instead for new ways to generate coherence in their music. In the absence of traditional voice leading based on tonic/dominant harmony, some composers gravitated toward the use of symmetry. By symmetry I mean the projection of a series of events above and below, or forward and backward from a central axis, with a one-to-one correspondence between events on one side of the axis and those on the other. In this article, I will focus primarily on vertical symmetry in pitch space. Because horizontal symmetry often accompanies vertical symmetry, however, it cannot be set aside altogether. George Crumb's La luna está muerta, muerta… from Night of the Four Moons, for example, contains several symmetrical pitch collections, arranged in the manner of a balanced arch-form. As Ex. 1 illustrates, four pitch sets, comprising a single symmetrical interval series, occur over the course of the composition. The pitch sets in the first half of the composition, moreover, are presented in reverse order – and, hence, upside down – in the second half, transferring symmetry into the linear dimension; the events in the second half of the piece, that is, mirror those in the first half, just as the intervals above the pitch axis mirror those below it in each of the pitch collections.

Today's technocrats and their followers treat music as a message which the composer (source) sends to a listener (receiver). In this way they believe that the solution to the problem of the nature of music and of the arts in general lies in formulae taken from information theory. Drawing up an account of bits or quanta of information transmitted and received would thus seem to provide them with ‘objective’ and scientific criteria of aesthetic value. Yet apart from elementary statistical recipes this theory—which is valuable for technological communications—has proved incapable of giving the characteristics of aesthetic value even for a simple melody of J. S. Bach. Identifications of music with message, with communication and with language are schematisations whose tendency is towards absurdities and desiccations. Certain African tom-toms cannot be included in this criticism, but these are exceptional. Hazy music cannot be forced into too precise a theoretical mould. It may be possible later, when present theories have been refined and new ones invented.

The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.