My hcmf 2017 started with Montreal's Quatuor Bozzini and pianist Philip Thomas performing three pieces by one of the festival's featured composers, Linda Catlin Smith. Smith's profile has been significantly raised in this country since the release of a portrait CD on Another Timbre, and she featured at Glasgow's Tectonics in May. Her compositional voice is distinct, one that avoids the grand statement in favour of half-familiar nooks and crannies, shading from folkish keening to an elusive chromatic space where Chopin meets Boulez and Feldman. Though each of the pieces, a Piano Quintet and two string quartets, Folkestone and Gondola, shared several aspects in their harmony and gesture, the larger picture as the music unfurled was quite different from piece to piece: the Piano Quintet explored quasi-independence between the bowed and keyed strings, while Folkestone proceeded in short fragments continually beginning again.

Visiting Borealis for two of its five-day stretch in March, I encountered a festival that offered a refreshingly diverse take on the field of experimental music – diverse not only in terms of who is making it (the festival actively works towards equality of representation) but also in the practices represented. Indeed, perhaps a majority of the works presented in the festival intersected with fields of artistic activity outside of conventional musical performance.

King's Place is a singular venue. A relative newcomer to London's range of concert halls, comprising multiple spaces that are of a matching bright and clear acoustic – very well-researched when designed, no doubt. Clean lines and wood panels abound: there are loads of loos and plenty of places to put your coat or pick up a drink. On paper it is the perfect venue for a contemporary classical concert.

‘Gently rumbling without direction’, a programme note appended to the first part of Cassandra Miller's solo for piano Philip the Wanderer, might equally have stood in as descriptor for tonight's programme tout court. This is not meant as a criticism. Time's arrow, the vector of narratives real or implied, may well be the most burdensome yet most easily sloughed off (and perhaps least missed) item of nineteenth-century baggage to be jettisoned by composers over the last century or so. What tonight's collaboration between An Assembly and Ensemble x.y (led and programmed by the increasingly omnipresent wunderkind of British new music, Jack Sheen) offered up was a quite different approach, a different way through the passage of time. Less music as organised sound; more sound in itself a means for organising time.

Questioning whether new music is ‘losing touch’, Lydia Rilling, in her first edition as artistic director of Luxembourg's rainy days festival, curated a programme which sought, via an exploration of ‘the emotional landscapes of contemporary music’, to ‘reveal’ that this is not the case. The festival's scope extended beyond concerts to sound installations, pre- and post-concert talks, an (all female-presented) conference dedicated to the festival topic, a newly affiliated composition academy, and a closing ‘bal contemporain’ which paired Frank Zappa and Alexander Schubert with onion soup, while composers, musicologists and curators let loose after such extensive reflection upon the question that had been posed at every turn, emblazoned on the yellow telephone book-sized festival programmes (from which all quotations in this review are taken), echoed on individual concert programmes, interrogating the listener from the tickets’ fine print: how does it feel?

On the 13 May 2018, under the beautiful, celestial, fresco ceiling of the city's opera house, the highly acclaimed Oper Stuttgart produced a captivating revival of composer Mark Andre's Wunderzaichen (2008–2014; Wunder, ‘miracle’, and Zaichen, old German for ‘sign’). The protagonist, ‘Johannes’, is a ‘speech role’, and André Jung met the challenge with a modest, yet rigorous, intellect. Julia Bauer, as ‘Maria’, displayed a sensitive and virtuosic vocal ability. The orchestra, under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling, mastered the majestically complex signatures of Andre's soundworld with commendable accuracy and a fluid simplicity.