The winner of the 2016 Turner Prize, the UK's most widely publicised prize for visual artists, is Helen Martens; earlier in the year she also won the Hepworth Prize. On both occasions she announced that she would share her prize money with her fellow nominees, a generous yet provocative gesture. It's good to share, of course, but isn't the point of prizes that someone should win? And if the prizewinner is selected from a group of possible prizewinners who are themselves selected from the much larger pool of all those eligible why not share the prize with everyone?

This article seeks to initiate discourse around the vibrant and somewhat uncharted electroacoustic weave that significantly contributes to Ireland's musical tapestry through a consideration of six diverse threads: Softday, Jennifer Walshe, Karen Power, Linda Buckley, Fergal Dowling and Jonathan Nangle. Investigation of Ireland's recent electroacoustic scene will confirm that an emerging DIY aesthetic aligns with international trends of the past decade, with pop-up events, improvisation groups, experimental music collectives and intermedia festivals providing avenues for collaborative and creative expression. It will provide contrasting, yet interconnected examples of what will be termed ‘DIYing’ including a discussion of influences, concepts, practices and brief analyses of works. It is hoped that this article will see the beginning of a wider acknowledgement of the rich musical dialogues that are taking place.

Christopher Butterfield is a composer and composition teacher. His music has been performed across Canada and in Europe, with recordings on the CBC, Artifact, and Collection QB labels. He is currently the Director of the School of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. Christopher was born in 1952 in Vancouver, BC. He studied composition at the University of Victoria with Rudolf Komorous and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with Bülent Arel. He was a performance artist, rock guitar player and composer while living in Toronto between 1977 and 1992, after which he returned to the University of Victoria as Assistant Professor of Composition.

I studied composition with Christopher between 2000 and 2005. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with him in Victoria. During our interview, I asked him about his life and work, and for his thoughts on how Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous has influenced composition in Canada over the last few decades.

The toy piano is fast becoming a concert instrument in its own right, with its own (growing) body of repertoire that has moved well beyond John Cage's 1948 classic Suite for Toy Piano. There are dedicated musicians specialising in toy piano performance all over the world, and numerous composers producing new works written specifically for the toy piano. This unusual miniature instrument provides a respite from the traditional implications of the grand piano, breaks the ice with audiences and allows pianists to perform in locations that would otherwise be inaccessible. In this article the author introduces the history and mechanism of the instrument, performance considerations, extended techniques and approaches to working with electronics, recent repertoire and suggestions for performers and composers. Discussion is supplemented with musical examples.

On 10 May 1989 pianist Philip Mead was engaged to play Tippett's Fourth Piano Sonata at Birmingham University on the occasion of the composer receiving his honorary doctorate there. This was preceded by an afternoon workshop on the piece with lively discussion between composer and pianist. Two days previously, on 8 May 1989, in preparation for the concert, Mead played the work privately to the composer. The information in this article, which is almost entirely drawn from those two meetings, begins with a brief description of working with Tippett. Then, after an overview of all four sonatas it makes general points about the structure and style of the Fourth Sonata. Finally, each movement is discussed in turn using ideas, many of which were initiated by the composer, developed by the pianist.

Linda Catlin Smith was born in 1957 and grew up in New York. She studied composition in New York and at the University of Victoria, before settling in Toronto in 1981. Linda has received Canada's prestigious Jules Léger prize for her work Garland (2005). She was the Artistic Director of Toronto's contemporary ensemble Arraymusic (1988–93), and a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective Urge (1992–2006). She currently teaches composition at Wilfrid Laurier University. I sat down with Linda in the summer of 2016 at her home in the Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood of Toronto to ask her about her life and work.

One of the most striking aspects of Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf's Kurtág-Cycle (2001), is the abundant use of intertextual references: Mahnkopf includes references to compositions of his own, as well as to works of other composers (e.g. Mark Andre). He also refers to literary sources, such as texts by Borges and Nietzsche. In first instance, this article provides a detailed inventory of these many musical and extra-musical references. Second, we highlight some of these interconnections by zooming in on the relationships between the different compositions within the Kurtág-Zyklus. A music analytical approach reveals the compositional strategies adopted by Mahnkopf in this work. Third, we examine the motivations behind Mahnkopf's specific choices: Why does Mahnkopf include references to certain composers such as Mark Andre and György Kurtág? And which underlying aesthetic, ideological or personal points of view guided the composer when establishing these specific connections? This paper presents a critical assessment of the interrelations between the two aspects of Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf's work: his theoretical writings and his musical compositions.

While fragility is typically defined as ‘the quality of being easily broken or damaged’, within a musical framework the term can be understood through a myriad of causal lenses. One must consider what can be ‘broken’ or damaged’ in a musical context, and secondly how this sense of impairment might present itself. This article offers an extensive categorisation of musical fragility, and a characterisation of it in its numerous forms across the works of a broad range of composers. Through classification, a distinction between local and large-scale fragility emerges. A typology of fragilities makes it possible both to identify them in works that might not necessarily be considered fragile and to identify works that use combinations of fragility types. This classification involves ten types, with compositions from new and experimental acoustic music offered as examples.

Thomas Adès's third opera, The Exterminating Angel, is based closely upon Luis Buñuel's 1962 film El ángel exterminador, in which the hosts and guests at a high-society dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the dining room. Initial critical response to the opera too often focused on superficial similarities and discrepancies between the two works at the expense of attending to the specifically musical ways in which Adès presented the drama. This article explores the role that repetition plays in the opera, and in particular how repetitions serve both as a means of critiquing bourgeois sensibilities and as a representation of (loss of) will. I conclude by drawing on the work of Deleuze in order to situate the climax of the opera against the notion of the eternal return, highlighting how the music articulates the dramatic failure of the characters to escape.

In 2014 composer, flutist and director of Western Australian new music ensemble Decibel, Cat Hope, sought to commission a work from Éliane Radigue. During discussions, Radigue proposed a collaborative composition with another composer, performer and lead interpreter of her acoustic work, Carol Robinson. The result was Radigue's first co-composed work, and the first work by Radigue for an Australian group. Robinson came to Australia to work directly with the Decibel ensemble for a nine-day development phase that culminated in a thirty-minute acoustic work, part of the OCCAM series, for flute, clarinet, percussion, viola and cello. Each OCCAM work is completely defined, and yet never exactly reproducible, because the particular interaction between sound, instrument, musician and acoustics requires constant adaptation. The process of developing the work, though extremely demanding, was fascinating and thoroughly rewarding because it obliges the performer to enter into a state of hyper acuteness, sensitivity and in some ways, belief. The musician is guided toward a level of awareness and reactivity that increases as the sound material itself is assimilated. It is never a question of replicating an event or sequence, but rather of understanding the elements that created the event and then allowing those elements to develop further. This article discusses the unique process involved in the elaboration of this new work and how it differs from the development of previous OCCAM pieces. It is written in the voices of both the commissioner, Cat Hope (main text), and the co-composer of the work, Carol Robinson (indented text in italics).

Features of Michael Finnissy's music are considered through some of the ideas and writings of anthropologist Tim Ingold. Finnissy and Ingold share a preoccupation with line and, more specifically, exploring Finnissy's compositional approach as applied anthropology provides productive insights into his music and performance practice. The starting point for this investigation is a consideration of three of Finnissy's pieces connected to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Completion of the Requiem KV 626 by W.A. Mozart and F.X. Süssmayr (2011); Cibavit eos (1991); and WAM (1990–91). These pieces provide a convenient set of examples with relevant features: music that connects to the past; music with elaborate line(s); music written for amateur performers; transcription; and instrumentalists that move as part of the performance. These recurring features of Finnissy's composition could be considered indicative of this anthropological approach; they are informed by an investment in people that aspires to musical and personal transformation.

The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent institutionalisation of post-serial and other avant-garde thinking meant that approaches to other kinds of modernism – and whether or not ostensibly postmodernist approaches could be included in such categories – only gradually came to be employed, during the course of the 1990s. This article discusses the work of four composers, Luís Tinoco, Nuno Côrte-Real, Eugénio Rodrigues and Tiago Cutileiro, as part of this context. Their approaches are radically different from each other, but each of these four demonstrates an engagement with compositional approaches from outside what Paulo Ferreira de Castro calls the ‘sacralised avant-garde’ that is proof of the remarkable stylistic expansion evident in contemporary composition in Portugal during recent decades which is, in its turn, closely intertwined with a perceptible aesthetic and philosophical broadening in the teaching of the subject.

The music of composer Klaus Lang (b. 1971) is often overlooked in broader discussions of New Music in Europe, and is little discussed outside of his native Austria. When his music is discussed, it is usually in relation to its fragile textures and extreme quietness. However, the notion of time in its various guises also plays a key role in Lang's work, and it is the scale and structure rather than volume and timbre of his music that this article probes. This paper looks at the construction and configuration of time in Lang's music utilising the writings of Henri Bergson, and specifically the notion of duration as a mediation of time and consciousness. I suggest that Lang's work is predicated on the fragile balancing of conscious and ‘clock’ time, creating structures that destabilise our perception of temporality in his work.