The Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra's lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have less influence on Dutch musical life, but recent cutbacks to arts subsidies threaten contemporary music and historical performance alike.

In his later music Giacinto Scelsi rejected the mediation of notation, improvising his works and viewing the scores, produced mostly by assistants, as a mere record. But to what extent did he really transcend the ‘tyranny of writing’ and how might one demonstrate this? Critics have tended to echo the composer in reducing the problem to an opposition between writing and sound per se. In this article I discuss the limitations of this view and propose a more structural approach, using in particular the analysis of Walter Ong. I argue that Scelsi's idiom, while novel in its extreme economy of means, uses these means in such a way as to restore a traditional sense of musical ‘grammar’. I illustrate the rhetorical versatility of this grammar by contrasting the two apparently similar movements of the Duo of 1965.

The return of expressionistic textures in Arnold Schoenberg's late chamber works creates a play of allusion that raises important questions about his creative process in the ‘American’ period. Passages in the Phantasy and the String Trio resemble the characteristic sound of the so-called Klangflächen (‘sound sheets’) that were located at key expressive moments in his music from the first two decades of the century. Their return in these two late instrumental works evokes associations with the mystical and spiritual, and gives rise to intertextual resonances that extend beyond the confines of closed form and the immanent referentiality of the musical material.

This article seeks to reassess Schoenberg's concept of expression by means of a hermeneutic understanding of his belated expressionism. Rather than adopting a conventional analytical approach that emphasizes structure and pitch, it makes the musical surface of the works the primary focus of attention. By pursuing the mimetic and allusive properties of sensuous similarity in certain textures within these works, the discussion elucidates how a hermeneutic approach might cause us to redefine Schoenberg's belated expressionism as self-reflexive Late Style.

What are the consequences of understanding a musical score as an ‘action plan’ – a composed set of performance instructions – rather than as a document, a transcript, or a concretization of a composer's idea and, ultimately, of a fixed musical work? This question is discussed through a consideration of four examples of contemporary percussion music – solo pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, David Lang, and Helmut Lachenmann. Considering the musical text in relation to the dynamics of a work's execution and performance can give us not only a ‘sound picture’ but also a kinaesthetic picture of the performer on stage. Through this shift of perspective the score comes to be viewed as a script or an agent, which then acts as both a foundation and a catalyst for the actions of the performer and his or her production of sound.

This article is one of a series exploring the spatialization of sound sources in recorded songs and how they may be understood (see also ‘The Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, twentieth-century music 5/2). Its theoretical basis is multi-faceted, utilizing notions of ecological perception, of the sound-box, of the singer's persona, and of interpersonal distance in communication, as well as further concepts from cognitive science. It focuses particularly on image schemata and proxemics, exemplifying them across a range of genres, while also addressing them critically, for instance from a feminist perspective. Finally, it explores how this theoretical basis helps us not only to understand the contribution of spatialization to the interpretation of songs and their meanings, but also to shed light on the role of other musical domains.