This article questions the narrow representation of the history of much early British electronic music, and challenges the way historians and writers have tended to cherry-pick and lionize certain individuals, while ignoring all the others that fall outside of the limited and regularly repeated version of events. It is an extension of the research presented in my compendium Tape Leaders, conceived during 2010 with the aspiration to catalogue all the early British electronic music composers who became active before 1970, presenting a biographical entry for as many experimenters as I could trace and documenting more than 100 individuals, including hobbyist tape activists, who have never before received recognition. Tape Leaders presents a completely different picture to the consensus that positions the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a handful of others, at the centre of electronic activity in Britain, with allegedly very little else happening until universities caught on at the end of the 1960s and began to offer courses and studio facilities.

During the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

The recent loss of composer Robert Ashley (1930–2014) prompted in some of us a grab-bag of reflections – private but perhaps peculiarly shareable. My first encounter with Ashley's music was when I was working in college radio in Chicago. We used to receive CDs from the label Lovely Music Ltd., among others. I suppose it was my first full-blown exposure to what we now call post-minimalist music, although these CDs did include earlier sound-art minimalism such as Alvin Lucier's. I'm not sure whether I got to hear William Duckworth's, Joan LaBarbara's, David Behrman's, Robert Ashley's, or ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny's music first, but despite some scepticism, I did find all of this music strangely attractive in ways I didn't expect.

During the 2014 International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Berlin-based composer Mark Andre (b. 1964, Paris) lectured specifically on how his own compositional practice is concerned with ‘interstices that occur between compositional polarities – the affect, the appearance, the families of time and sound, the families of impulse responses – before they unfold themselves fragile, shadowy, breathlessly and fade away’. Drawing upon Andre's teachings at Darmstadt, as well as certain theories on existence put forward by Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Pierre Boulez, this article will work to prise open and unfold a broad, contextual backdrop for theorising the composer's own compositional practice. In particular, this article will argue that Andre, like the authors named above, uses the position of interstices to contest the working of ‘synthetic’ structure in (Western) civilisation, and so relieve, even if momentarily – by allowing ‘being’ to freely resonate, even speak – any notion of synthetic impingement.

Queer processes abound in fixed media electroacoustic music with voice, in both the composition and listening processes. ‘Queer’ means transgressive, unstable, and disruptive, and queer processes break down restrictive traditional binaries. In this article, I name the queer where some may have thought it does not or could not exist, in well-known works by Berio, Stockhausen and Lucier, as well as lesser-known works by Truax, Normandeau and Westerkamp. Any claim to the queer in these electroacoustic works is inherently political because the core of the term's meaning is to disrupt and perturb the status quo, which is maintained by existing power structures. I outline how composers unsettle the gendered voice and exploit its mediating role between the body and language. Studio manipulation is further enhanced by the acousmatic listening context, which is intimate and unsettling (‘queer’), and can depict the ‘third space’ between the bodies of the voice and listener.

This short article draws on, without mentioning, a very large body of works written over a very long period of time which share a common critique of the musical canon of great works as traditionally conceived. Chief among the musicologists drawn from are Georgina Born and Lydia Goehr (especially The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works). Readers familiar with these criticisms can safely skip to the final two sections, which explain why I am reinventing this particular musicological wheel at this moment in time. While I believe my framing is reasonably novel, I am under no illusions that the argument being made here is a new one. Nevertheless, the emphasis on community and practice feels urgent and perhaps merits retelling a story that is by now very old indeed.

It is now six weeks since I stepped between the train and the platform at Frankfurt am Hain, rushing to catch the slightly delayed 17:34 train to Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof. I'm not sure why I was rushing – the first concert was not until 20:00, so I had plenty of time. My right foot fell through, and the front of my leg hit the step of the train quite hard. I thought it would bleed, but it didn't. It just turned to a very hard bruise (haematoma I was later told). You couldn't really see the raised bump with the eye, it wasn't sore, but if you ran your hand over my leg you could feel it. I had booked my train from Liverpool specifically so I could see Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Vortex Temporum once more. I had seen it at Sadler's Wells and had been pleased, but was lucky enough to see Rosas performing Work/Travail/Arbeid as an installation at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. There, it was a revelation. Whether it was the space, the extra forces, or just the freedom to walk away, I was entranced. Best of all it was free. She was there herself, making comments, keeping an eye on things.

This article serves as an overview of Jakob Ullmann's voice, books and FIRE series, providing an examination of the cycle's scores, and the fragmented memories contained within. voice, books and FIRE stands monolithically in the composer's catalogue. The music – Ullmann refers to it as an ‘imaginary folklore’ – is presented through an elaborate notational system: partly effaced by layers of religious iconography, abstract imagery and fragments of religious texts and lists of names. The series (currently unfinished) serves as an elaborate memorial to the victims of Stalinist persecution as well as the demise of religious and cultural traditions across European history. In Ullmann's most ambitious and striking body of work to date, the score is encountered as a palimpsest – an overlaying and effacement of memory. The notion of the palimpsest is also traced through the music's performance and subsequent recording, assessing Ullmann's use of extreme quietness – a partial erasure – as a destabilising force for the performers, which ultimately renders the work fragile.

Julian Anderson has been interestingly public about the genesis of his new orchestral piece Incantesimi, co-commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and Boston Symphony Orchestra, writing about its genesis in The Guardian as a trailer to its UK Proms premiere. Premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle in June 2016, Incantesimi toured to Rotterdam and Lucerne before opening that orchestra's Prom (Rattle's last as their chief conductor) in September. Wanting not to write a ‘showpiece’ but instead ‘something slow and quiet’, Anderson described Incantesimi as a ‘nocturne’ which takes its musical inspiration from Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, in that five themes are deployed ‘in perpetual orbit’. He also spoke of his focus on the Berlin Philharmonic's beauty of sound as a prompt to write something that would unfold slowly.

The Salzburg Festival publicity office knew that it had a major musical event on its hands. Before the premiere of Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel on 28 July 2016, they held a reception for the world's press on a rooftop balcony overlooking the old town (which, in the name of investigative journalism, your intrepid TEMPO correspondent attended). The procession from such genteel surroundings and through the bustling Hofstallgasse into the auditorium, in which bells were already chiming in the orchestral pit and sheep were standing patiently on stage, enacted one of the central themes of the opera: that of the passage from bourgeois respectability (and, let's be frank, privilege) into a world that is less predictable, less explicable.

In the preface to the 2016 International Summer Course for New Music programme booklet, the festival's artistic director, Thomas Schäfer, repeated a question that Irvine Arditti had put to him when they were discussing the Arditti Quartet's concerts: ‘shall we attack the future or dig up the past?’. This question, posed in order to establish some form of discursive framework for the course, became a subliminal trace throughout the festival. The participants' bags, for instance, were imprinted with the slogan, ‘attack the future’ and Schäfer ended his preface by stating, ‘let me call out to everyone involved, and to our audience: let's attack the future!’. The air of the festival itself, however, seemed slightly more reserved throughout its lengthy 17-day span. There were, of course, moments of theatrical flamboyance, such as Fantasises of Downfall (2015) by Johannes Kreidler, metalized void (2015/16) by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, The Lichtenberg Figures (2014/15) by Eva Reiter, Sideshow (2009/15) by Steven Kazuo Takasugi, EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2015/16) by Jennifer Walshe, and Living Instruments (2015) by Serge Vuille. Yet, overall the atmosphere of the festival seemed to be one of quiet vigilance as events unfolded.

For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival has been organising some of the most exciting new music events in town. In contrast to the eclectic extravaganzas of previous years, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused: three nights only, dedicated to the work of Julius Eastman. The programme was a revelation, even for those who are aware of Eastman and his music.

In response to Paul Valéry's words after the First World War in La Crise de l'esprit – ‘We later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’ – the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler remarks, in his own chapter entitled ‘Apocalypse Without God’ in his What Makes Life Worth Living,