This article investigates the tension between originality and success for ‘emerging composers’ involved in composition opportunities in the British contemporary classical music scene. It utilises survey responses from 47 new music composers to better understand their experiences of these very public signs of compositional success. Though the narrative of the original artist is still significant, conflicts arise between ‘uniqueness’ and the realities of the composition opportunity. Composers aspire to be original, but are aware that a number of other, more instrumental, factors play a crucial role in being chosen. Despite the continuing importance of opportunities to many composers’ development, there are areas that could be made more transparent to ensure they are benefitting an aesthetically diverse range of artists.

This article consists of a collection of some of the tweets published on the @composeradvice twitter feed (www.twitter.com/composeradvice) between May 2016 and January 2018. The feed was designed to give advice to composers of experimental music.

Linda Buckley is one of the leading figures in the thriving Irish new music scene, a composer whose work draws together many different elements, from spectralism, to ambient electronica, to minimalism and Irish traditional music. This article uses five works created in the last decade as lenses through which to examine a creative practice in which these apparently disparate elements have become increasingly integrated. From the 2008 string trio, Fiol, to the orchestral work Chiyo (2011), to Torann for large ensemble and electronics (2015), and finally to two works with string quartet, ó íochtar mara (2015) and Haza (2016), these works represent stages within the evolution of a highly distinctive musical language.

This article is devoted to the music of Paweł Szymański. The author is convinced that an intertextual reading of his music is the most compelling one. Taking into consideration Szymański's two-level technique she interprets his works by means of categories elaborated in the field of literature: intertextuality exponent, interpretant, and text characterised by intertextual play. In the second part of the article two different works are discussed, the first representing the algorithmic, and the second the improvisational method of composing. The author concludes that these works are deeply rooted in tradition and, at the same time, are modern, as well as original, with the interpretants constituting the major source of their originality.

This article offers generalised reflections on current aesthetic interests and values within the field of new music. Critical composition and postmodernism are considered for the relevance these historic positions might hold today. Then two important trends of the past decade are presented: first, music that draws attention toward the sounding shape and act of listening, reflecting the recent surge of interest in materialism across academic and artistic disciplines; and second, pieces that include aspects such as physical action, lighting and theatrical approaches to expand the possibilities of concert hall work beyond the purely sonic.

New Music thought and compositional praxis has excessively focused inward as a source of inspiration. In the last ten years, multidisciplinary composition has offered one possible solution to this problem. By combining music with theatrical elements and digital media, composers have produced works that are ‘not for the ears alone’. This paper offers a typification of its most novel aspects, and traces them in the author's own creative work, which additionally include the use of borrowed material as a means for establishing referentiality and elaborating semantic narratives.

In 2002 Christian Wolff was a guest composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and during the course of the festival he was interviewed by Christopher Fox and by James Gardner. Fox's interview took place before an audience in the Lawrence Batley Theatre on 25 November; Gardner's interview was recorded in private in the George Hotel, Huddersfield on 27 November, and edited excerpts from that recording were subsequently used in a programme produced by Radio New Zealand. The conversation presented here has been compiled by James Gardner from his transcriptions of the two interviews and presents a wide-ranging discussion of Wolff's musical preoccupations across every phase of his compositional career, from the early piano pieces of the 1950s, to his involvement with indeterminacy in the 1960s, to the political concerns evident in his music after 1970, to the works of the last three decades in which indeterminate and determinate methods of composition are combined.

This article is based on a lecture given on 28 April 2018 as the keynote address at the inaugural conference of CenM@S, the Centre for New Music at Sheffield University. It offers a series of reflections on time and musical composition, time being considered both in the sense of history – our present sense of the past – and experiential time as we listen to music. Specific reference is made to the author's Canti del carcere (2012–18) and the texts by Gramsci and Dante that are set in these madrigals, each of which is also concerned with the passage of time and the ways in which ideas become consolidated. Ideas of time and history in the music of Cage, Nono and Feldman are also considered.

Time through history can be marked by the passing of generations. Archeological sites reveal the intimate secrets of our ancient ancestors through thousands of pieces of broken pottery recovered from the ground. Piecing together these shards can be likened to reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle, one of long forgotten civilisations, places, memories and stories.

Since 1975 Richard had been based in Australia, where he taught at the Sydney Conservatorium, but he was born in England, in Chichester, and studied at Hull University. In the late 60s and early 70s he was active as a contemporary music pianist and in the mid-70s became part of the Cologne music scene, working as Stockhausen's Teaching Assistant at the Cologne Staatliche Musikhochschule from 1973 until his move to Australia. But his most significant contribution to new music was as a writer. His 1999 book on the life and work of Ligeti is a superb introduction to the composer's work, and in 2005 it was followed by his book of lectures on Stockhausen, Six Lectures from the Stockhausen Courses Kürten 2002; he also co-edited the collected writings of Ferneyhough with James Boros.

Over the past ten years, performance scores have been radically foregrounded in a variety of performance practices. Whether such notations assume a prescriptive function, visually projected for musicians to interpret, or a descriptive one, unfolding as a documentation of a live coding performance, how might such a foregrounding reframe the listening process for an audience? Does a notational schema help promote a deeper, structural level understanding of a musical work? This article will consider these various questions, exploring how principles of graphic design and the transparency of notation contribute to the listening experience. It will suggest that works featuring projected scores find aesthetic value in the juxtaposition of notation's traditionally mnemonic function and the unique temporal modalities that projected scores establish.

Over the last decade, Larry Goves, composer and lecturer of music at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), has been steadily enriching the experimental music community in Manchester, UK. As an artistic director and curator, Goves regularly presents his and other's work through the ensemble The House of Bedlam, the annual New Music North West festival, and the Decontamination series. This review covers the twelfth and thirteenth instalments of the Decontamination series, presented as a double-bill at RNCM's Carol Nash Recital Room on 28 February 2018.

For the moment, ignore the information above. David Helbich didn't perform his No Music – Earpieces at Café Oto on Saturday 13 January. I did, a few weeks later, on a Suffolk beach. If you don't count the seagulls, I had an audience of one.