The Gaudeamus Muziekweek is now in its sixty-ninth year and, as ever, it focuses on young music pioneers, in hopes of presenting a snapshot of the newest ideas in contemporary music being developed across the world. The festival's dense and diverse programming is compressed into five full days, in 2016 from 7 to 11 September, squeezed principally within one labyrinthian building, the TivoliVredenburg, whose impressive monolithic glass exterior imposes itself as a pillar of cultural life in central Utrecht. Amid this density, it is impossible to provide anything but a partial account of the festival, and my presentation is far from impartial, as I was one of the five nominated composers for this year's Gaudeamus Award. If only from these fragments and particular foci, then, I will present my own reactions and estimations of how the festival has highlighted some of the innovations and interests of a few of the newest practitioners of new new music.

Impuls, the International Ensemble and Composition Academy for Contemporary Music, has in the past offered a workshop that deviates from the main activities of instrumental classes and ensemble work, composition classes, lectures, and call-for-score reading sessions, taking the form of an intensive course which plays with the grey areas between composer and performer, performance and installation, cochlear and non-cochlear music. In 2017, with the Academy now in its tenth edition, the focus of this workshop moved from ‘Composition Beyond Music’, led in recent years by Peter Ablinger (2013) and by Georg Nussbaumer (2015), to ‘Collaboratory’, a new workshop led by Belgian composer/performer Stefan Prins, imagined in collaboration with Ute Pinter, the festival's secretary general.

The 2016 Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik took place from 29 July to 14 August. That's more than two weeks of concerts and lectures. As anyone who has been to a New Music festival knows, you can't see everything, and you'll end up missing stuff that winds up being extremely important.

On the evening of 18 April 2017, the world premiere of Chaya Czernowin's highly anticipated new opera, Infinite Now, was performed at Vlaamse Opera Ghent, Belgium. The ambience of the venue was buzzing, highly charged, electrical – a visceral state that seemed contextually appropriate for the lengthy 2.5-hour experience (without intermission) ahead. Programmed as part of the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen 2016–17 ‘Borderline’ series, the set-up and contour of the pre-concert events became eerily symbolic: a large, grandiose, guarded door separated the rooms holding the press conference and pre-concert lecture, through which the composer would eventually pass toward the latter to conclude: ‘[t]he power to continue, that is what [the opera] is all about. It is not the power to be happy or to be sad. … It is much more morass, elemental and existential. The power to continue’. In an instant, the strong ring of emergency sirens then happened to pierce and penetrate from the world beyond – a rather poignant signal to declare the doors to the first performance officially open.

Why Swedish contemporary music over the past few decades has been such a provincial affair is a mystery. Most of the pieces receiving critical attention from the media are using neo-Romantic aesthetics – bombastic orchestral sounds more connected to the world of Richard Strauss than Helmut Lachenmann. Hearing this type of music, often characterised by its excesses of art nouveau ornamentations, one may wonder what century one is living in. Where is the contemporary world?

In the midst of the wealth of music available at this year's Aldeburgh Festival, a vintage bus tour around Snape of churches and their organs seemed an unlikely treat. Every church organ is designed for the same purpose – a sacred instrument of the liturgy to accompany congregational and choral singing and, occasionally, to blast from above – but each has a different personality.

For those who, consciously or not, have come to associate today's exploratory music with small ensembles, electronics or performative physicality, the symphony orchestra can seem an unlikely source of new horizons. The orthodoxy of the concert hall, the uniforms, the absorption of human performers into an abstract whole, the stasis of musicians and audience: these aren't new anxieties but they persist in interesting ways.

A theme for the festival in Donaueschingen was popular music, or so I heard in a radio broadcast on the six-hour drive from Berlin to that little Southern German new music metropole. But in Donaueschingen, there really wasn't that much pop music; the theme was actually a kind of after-construction, something that had, according to the festival director Björn Gottstein, crystallised as a kind of a common denominator in several of the works that had been commissioned. For me this felt like grabbing something out of the void; in the three days of the usual intense programme, it hardly shone through as something specific.

One particularly engaging historical inquiry at Maerzmusik 2017 was the concert titled Re-inventing Smetak, a concert with two documentary interludes on Brazil-based composer and instrument builder Walter Smetak, as well as premieres of commissions of living composers to write for his instruments, most notably Liza Lim's Ronda – The Spinning World, which integrated Smetak's conceptualisation of the world as ‘polarities of energy flowing across and spiraling around axes of evolution and he built his instruments or Plásticas Sonoras (sound sculptures) to express his complex symbology of spiritual relations’. ‘Across and spiraling around axis of evolution’ referred in part to the sprawling percussion-instrument tree in the centre of the stage with branches of tiny percussion objects dangling from its limbs, and a few scattered barrel-like instruments that made ratchet-like noises when they were turned and rotated by the percussionists. Percussion is already so varied nowadays that one isn't easily engaged by undiscovered instruments from the past, yet Lim's piece also included some sensitive, signature string writing and was able to incorporate Smetak's percussion instruments and jangle and rattle and integrate them at significant formal moments – navigating the physical spectacle on stage and navigating a tricky compositional assignment.

Jörg Widmann is a German composer who is acutely conscious but certainly not in awe of his musical forebears. His best-known string quartet, no. 3 ‘The Hunt’ makes dramatic use of – and has great fun with – Schumann. His 2011 concerto Flûte en suite, performed at the 2014 Proms, more than nods to Bach and baroque elegance. In Armonica, commissioned by the International Mozarteum Foundation to celebrate Mozart's 251st birthday in 2007, Widmann surprisingly and yet unsurprisingly features the glass harmonica, the distinctive instrument that Mozart featured in his own last chamber piece, the Adagio and Rondo for glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello, K617. Mozart teamed the instrument with the quieter representatives from the wind and string families; Widmann places it against the whole orchestra.

On a gloomy winter's night in Dalston what could be better than Kammerklang at Café OTO? Out of the cold and into a packed house – standing room only for many of us, and sauna-like levels of humidity – for an evening in which an audio-visual piece about bells by Christine Sun Kim and a new string quartet by Lisa Illean frame the main event, two new pieces by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller.

In London the bank – as a building, its symbolism and its position within the cityscape – is sacrosanct. In Oslo banks become arts venues. Although it is moving soon to new premises being built further up the waterfront, the National Museum of Contemporary Art is currently housed in a former bank. A few blocks away is Sentralen, a relatively new, multi-purpose performance arts space, meeting place, restaurant and bar.

The first weekend of the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival saw an eclectic and vibrant mix of musical events. Artistic director Graham McKenzie promised a festival that was going to be ‘undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making’, and the opening days also manifested a strong sense of artistic difference and distance as well. The presence of Georg Friedrich Haas, this year's Composer in Residence, and Rebecca Saunders seemed to fire up such underlying dynamic energies. Throughout the weekend both composers took part in public interviews and both had UK and world premieres, yet they only presented in parallel: the programming kept them apart. In turn, the weekend amplified various levels of similarity and divergence between the two composers, exposing some fascinating creative tensions.

In the heart of the University of Huddersfield's Creative Arts Building sits the unassuming Phipps Hall, which has given itself over to five days of total electronic sound immersion. The University has grown accustomed to attracting pioneering artists in contemporary music over the last four decades, both to its in-house research centre CeReNeM, and to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival every November. The relatively younger Electric Spring Festival takes place every February and is now able to stand alongside its older sibling, offering the public an impressive and diverse programme of composers and artists specialising in electronic sound manipulation. This year was no exception. Running from 22 to 26 February, there was something to suit everyone, from improvised live-coded dance music to classic musique concrète masterpieces. From its conception in 1995, the aim of the festival has been to offer breadth and surprise to its audience.

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival leaves an indelible impression on any brave soul who ventures into the chill, dark November nights across its ten days, a rite of passage challenging conceptions of the stuff music is made of. Now in its thirty-ninth year, this is one of the more established contemporary music festivals, yet it never fails to provoke and stimulate, a snapshot of current musical preoccupations. The first weekend traditionally showcases a selection of significant works, setting the tone for the subsequent week, and 2016 was no exception. Jennifer Walshe and the Arditti String Quartet opened the festival in a ‘declaration of love to life on earth’. EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2016) is an eco-treatise on the bombardment the world is suffering – a torrent of visual and vocal disturbance with the arch-complexist Arditti gamely along for the ride, a playful synergy of theatre, voice and string quartet, preparing us for what was to come over the next few days.

Unlike many other New Music festivals, Eclat has so far resisted the temptation to build the festival programmes around central themes. The Eclat festival is one of the major annual gatherings of the German and international scene for contemporary music, taking place in Stuttgart and organised by ‘Musik der Jahrhunderte’ (Christine Fischer) in collaboration with the SWR (Lydia Jeschke). The lack of a central theme doesn't indicate a pragmatic or vague approach to curation, but the festival organisers’ aim to assemble a selection of artists, ensembles and pieces that are either directly asking or indirectly raising questions considered relevant and at the forefront of the scene's discourse at the time of the event.

March 18 was the first-ever World Toy Piano Day, and what better occasion for a concert showcasing this intriguing instrument. The pianist Xenia Pestova hosted Non-Piano at IKLECTIK Art Lab; the toy piano naturally took centre stage, with guest appearances from other non-piano keyboard instruments. IKLECTIK was an inspired venue – cosy without being cramped, with an acoustic that could accommodate both intimate whisperings and all-engulfing sound worlds. Pestova performed in every piece and was also a very charming host, establishing an informal tone from the get-go. No programmes (a boon! – no rustling), so everything was announced, with explanation of gestation and performance history. The relaxed surroundings well suited the exploratory and educational nature of the evening.