Childhood play, leadership, suspense, thoughts of mediation and conciliation, Hamlet-like reflections on being and not-being, facing and conquering fears, and a hunger for stability and security in personal relationships, together with a full panoply of riffs on the colour yellow in European popular culture – many of them frankly unpleasant – are among the challenging ingredients of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus LICHT, the last segment of the seven-opera LICHT jigsaw to be put in place. Stockhausen's operas are intricate literary puzzles or charades, every detail of which can be assigned a number of coded meanings. Despite bravura performances by an exceptional team of musicians, Graham Vick skated over much of the composer's uneasy symbolism in a brusque and simplistic arte povera production which, along with a battery of unsolved sound projection issues inherent in the score, placed altogether too much emphasis on the composer's dark side.

This article is the most comprehensive survey to date of the output of David Blake. Although, for reasons of space, it cannot be all-inclusive, every effort has been made to reflect the breadth and depth of a corpus the scale and diversity of which demands attention. In order to chart effectively the composer's development and illustrate how his achievement in one particular medium has impacted upon contemporary and subsequent works in other fields, a broadly chronological approach has been adopted.

The music of Mark R. Taylor (b. 1961) is as yet little known. In part, this derives from his unusual profile in the current musical scene. The initial characterization of his work given in this article takes his own remarks from a note inscribed at the end of a piano fragment from the mid-1990s as a framework. From his earliest compositions onwards, the handling of musical materials has depended on strictly controlled processes that are conveyed through a notable ‘simplicity of presentation’. This gives the work a semblance of postmodernism; but Taylor distances himself from the allusiveness, playfulness and irony of this movement, preferring to recognize a ‘personal expressivity’ characteristic of ‘the better kind of postmodernism’. These opposing tendencies to objectivity on the one hand and to expressivity on the other are components of a dialectical musical expression in which the music is ‘struggling but failing to mask profound inner turmoil’.

Sur Incises, first performed in 1998, is the most recent major work by Pierre Boulez, but there has been very little published writing discussing it, although Boulez himself discussed the piece in a lecture released on DVD. Like many of his recent works, Sur Incises reworks existing material – taking the short piano piece Incises and expanding it into a large-scale work for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists. This article examines how the gestures, harmonies and even the instrumentation of the earlier piece are ‘refracted’ – presented in multiple overlaid versions as if a prism had revealed the possibilities inherent in the original material. Sur Incises is discussed with reference to common concerns in Boulez's work since the 1970s – its use of quasi-thematic ‘signals’ to mark structure, its use of luxurious harmonic fields and chord multiplication, its virtuosic toccata material, and its use of the SACHER hexachord.

This interview with Elliott Carter, conducted on 30 May 2012, is among the last that he gave. Carter talks candidly about his past, the present, and what his legacy will be. While discussing his latest works – a series of short epigrams and a new setting of Wallace Stevens poems – Carter explains how each composition is a unique musical adventure; consequently, he does not repeat himself. Innovation is the essence of Carter's oeuvre, clearly manifested in his string quartets, which Carter still views as his grandest musical statements. He speaks openly about the difficulties of getting these and other works performed well, the lack of performances of his compositions on the West Coast, and the current trends and direction of composition today. Carter recalls important experiences and events in his life involving Nadia Boulanger, Ives, Cage, Boulez, and Stravinsky.

In 2002 Elliott Carter marked Oliver Knussen's fiftieth birthday with a short piece – Au Quai – for viola and bassoon, accompanied by the following comments: ‘As modernism seemed headed for shipwreck, Olly Knussen, treasuring the wonderful works that that movement produced and still does, stepped into the breach and … not only brought these works to a vivid enthusiastic life which has long been concealed, but also added significant works of his own’. Knussen's time has clearly been Carter's time too. Yet placing aspects of Knussen's compositional thinking into an American context can highlight the kind of distinctive qualities that, while leading less sympathetic British critics to write of an ‘aesthetic of avoidance’, might be more usefully interpreted as an intensely personal response to European as well as American modernism in all their various phases.

Beethoven's famous letter to ‘The Immortal Beloved’ still remains a central reference point for our image of his life and music. Gerald Barry's 2007 composition for bass voice and ensemble – simply entitled Beethoven – sets this text in its entirety, continuing an engagement with Beethoven's own words and presenting a striking juxtaposition of language and music. This article explores the ways in which Barry at times underpins and in other places undercuts the apparent meaning of the words, and how he presents a reading of the letter that is clearly alive to its inherent self-contradictions. Characteristically, Barry brings together a number of highly expressive and strongly contrasted musical characters in this work; an examination of aspects of his compositional language illustrates how material is propagated and form articulated, and explores the way in which these techniques interact in the creation of an expressive and emotionally charged whole.

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.

In his writings on music Hans Keller includes Skalkottas among the few great twentieth-century composers of ‘symphonic thought’, and considers him to be the only ‘symphonic genius’ after Schoenberg whose ‘genius’ remains to be discovered. Although during the time of his writings, Keller was in a minority in his appreciation of this relatively minor composer in the Western art music canon, he did not analyse any of Skalkottas's music in support of his views, as he did with the works of other composers who, although important to him, are not elevated to such a high plane. This paper first gives an overview of Keller's approach to and understanding of symphonic thought, as presented in his various writings and exemplified in his analyses of Schoenberg's music. Subsequently, it examines certain of Skalkottas's 12-note works and the compositional techniques he applies to construct them, which exhibit these characteristics of symphonic thought defined by Keller, and which might be used to substantiate his unexplained but intuitively correct assertions.

John Cage's music was little known in the Soviet Union until the late 1960s, as official communist cultural policy would not allow his music to be performed or researched. This makes it all the more surprising that the only visit by the composer to Soviet Russia had become possible by 1988. The Soviet officials were planning a large festival of contemporary music in St Petersburg in 1988. With the changing climate Tikhon Khrennikov, the secretary of the All Soviet Union League of Composers, appointed by Stalin in 1948, was keen to be seen as a progressive at the time of Gorbachev's perestroika, and he approved the invitation for Cage to be present at the performances of his works in St Petersburg. This article includes interviews with the composer conducted by the author in 1987–1989, as well as recollections of the meetings with Cage at his home in New York City and in Moscow.

Michael Tippett called T.S. Eliot his ‘spiritual and artistic mentor’, but the relationship between the two men has never been studied in detail. Eliot's numerous discussions with Tippett in the 1930s proved a lasting influence on the composer's beliefs about the coming-together of words and music. This article has three aims: first, to use Tippett's correspondence and writings to bring together the most accurate and complete biographical description of the relationship to date; second, to show that Tippett quoted from and alluded to the work of T.S. Eliot not only in his early pieces (as has hitherto been thought) but in much later compositions such as The Ice Break, The Mask of Time, and Byzantium; and third, to examine the libretto of Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time in the light of the composer's talks with Eliot. This article suggests that the inclusion in the oratorio of Negro spirituals was influenced by Eliot, and provides an analysis of the composer's own libretto through the lens of T.S. Eliot's essay ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’. Eliot's essay examines the number of voices in which the ‘I’ of a poem can speak, freed from the specificities of prose, and this article argues that Tippett, influenced by Eliot, harnessed the form of oratorio, freed from the specificities of opera, to allow it to speak in many voices.

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.

With Ada Sketches, for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and percussion, Mesmerism, for solo piano and chamber orchestra, and Calculus of the Nervous System, for large orchestra, in 2011 the young British composer Emily Howard completed a triptych of works in which she drew decisively on the life and thoughts of Ada Lovelace for inspiration. Today, Lovelace is recognized as a pioneer of 19th-Century mathematics, who in her lifetime attempted to bring together art and mathematics in Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. She was convinced of the power of mesmerism and believed that there was a possible mathematical calculation for the human nervous system. This article shows how Emily Howard took up and developed musically these central threads of Lovelace's work in her ‘Lovelace Trilogy’.

In 2007, two high-profile musical responses to the Christian Passion narrative were written: the little match girl passion, by American composer David Lang, and Scottish composer James MacMillan's St John Passion. A devout Catholic, MacMillan's faith has influenced almost every work he has written to date, and a passion setting therefore seemed inevitable. Lang, on the other hand, has Jewish roots, and is relatively secular in his choice of extra-musical themes in his works: even when using sacred texts, he usually sets them in a secular context. Unsurprisingly, MacMillan's and Lang's contrasting approaches towards the Christian Passion resulted in fundamentally different works, yet both composers cite Bach as a key inspiration in their settings. This study examines the extent to which the influence of Bach's St Matthew Passion, in particular, is present in this pair of 21st-century passions, with regard to both their music and their theology.

This paper examines the sketches for Henri Dutilleux's Symphony No. 2, Le Double, held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel. The material is described in more detail than has been attempted hitherto, testing and challenging some previous statements and conclusions. It also reveals sketches that have remained hidden, leading to some surprising new facts, including the extent of Dutilleux's indecision regarding Le Double's instrumentation and his struggle to compose part of the second movement, as well as an early sketch for a different opening to the work. It seeks, finally, to show how some of the newly discovered material has implications for how we view the finished composition.

The full score of Béla Bartók's one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) reached its final form through many intermediate stages and after many years. The most comprehensive revision had been carried out in 1917 before Bluebeard was finally put on the programme of the Budapest Opera House. Bartók's revisions concerned not only the ending of the opera and the vocal parts but also the instrumentation. On the basis of all available primary sources, the present article examines how the instrumentation changed between 1911 and 1925, when the full score was published by Universal Edition. As a result of experiences gained during rehearsals of The Wooden Prince in 1917, Bartók added two instruments, the celesta and the xylophone, which he had originally not used in Bluebeard. However, the original score included two tenor tuba parts, which he later replaced with trumpets and trombones. In the revised score Bartók applied new instrumental techniques, corrected an unplayable passage, made the orchestral material thinner in favour of the vocal parts, and altered the instrumentation in order to emphasize motivic connections. Most of these alterations, however, do not represent a conceptual change in the opera's instrumentation but rather realize Bartók's original ideas in a more precise and more elaborate way.

The 2012 Cultural Olympiad contained plenty of events that might have happened quite normally without the 2012 badge. The Olympics themselves may even have contributed to a 40% drop in museum attendance over the summer, as recently reported in some newspapers. But Birmingham Opera Company's production, starting on 22 August, of Mittwoch, the ‘unstageable’ third part of Stockhausen's Licht, at the Argyle Works in Great Barr Street was a Mo Farah moment. Not only for the Olympian commitment and talent required, but also because without Olympian funding (something in the order of £1 million was rumoured) it simply would not have been possible. Director Graham Vick had co-opted the varied talents of Ex Cathedra, London Voices, Paul Brown as designer, Giuseppe di Iorio in charge of lighting, Ron Howell as choreographer, and Kathinka Pasveer as musical director.

This interview, based on a conversation with Simon Bainbridge at London's City Literary Institute in June 2011, presents something of a rounded portrait of the composer while covering a good deal of ground. We began our conversation with a discussion of a recent work for orchestra, Concerti Grossi, going into some detail in matters of scoring and structure. The discussion then broadened to cover such topics as the creative process, formative influences (for example, his parents' activity in the visual arts, Debussy's Jeux, John Lambert and Gunther Schuller), instrumentation and the relationship of music and text. This led on specifically to Bainbridge's settings of Primo Levi, in for example the cycle Ad Ora Incerta, and to a consideration of the composer's relationship with the audience.