The glowing critical response to Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (2000) has focused particularly on the visceral effect created by Haas's use of ‘endless’ scales, richly saturated microtonal chords, and passages that take place in total darkness. Discussion of these features has often led reviewers and commentators to use forms of description and praise which evoke the old (but lately rejuvenated) aesthetic category of the sublime. This article explores these connections with sublime aesthetics in more detail as a way of clarifying both philosophical and interpretative perspectives on in vain. The idea of the sublime serves as a thread connecting aspects of spectral technique and aesthetics, the mathematical visions of M.C. Escher, and the charged socio-political context in which the work was written.

In her book The Philosophical Imaginary, Michèle Le Doeuff claims philosophers use imagery precisely where their argument is at its weakest in order to provide an indistinct rhetorical space which cannot be clearly judged or criticised. Using Le Doeuff's framework, I examine programme notes: descriptive writing from programmes and grant applications that often tie the music to an extra-musical source of meaning. I point out instances where what is at stake in the work shifts from place to place, performing a determined meaning for the genre's outsiders, but indicating semantic superfluity to insiders who will tangibly judge the music on search committees and grant panels. After discussing genre theory and the history of new music, I argue that this imagery has a deeper social function: to gain social capital by performing diversity while maintaining the cultural power afforded by the genre's roots in hegemonic formalism.

‘Motive’ or ‘motif’ has long been a familiar term in writing about music, not least because many writers enjoy the word-play available when a composer's possible motivation for inventing and elaborating specific motivic materials is under discussion. The extent to which motives reach beyond melody into harmony has arguably become a more conscious concern of composers who have moved beyond traditional tonality, and some of the consequences of such concerns are considered here, in relation to recent works by two leading British composers, George Benjamin (b. 1960) and his one-time student Christian Mason (b. 1984).

Aaron Einbond was born in New York in 1978. He received his compositional education in the US (Harvard, University of California, Berkeley), the UK (Cambridge, Royal College of Music) and France (IRCAM), and his teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion and Philippe Leroux. He currently teaches music composition, sound and technology at City University, London. He is interested in applications of technology within instrumental music, and almost all of his works combine electronics and acoustic instruments. Since 2007 – beginning with his piece Beside Oneself for viola and electronics (first performed by Ellen Ruth Rose), composed while studying at the University of California, Berkeley – he has also used audio analysis and retrieval software to transcribe recorded sounds into instrumental notation.

Einbond's interest in phonographic transcription connects his work to that of other composers of his generation, including Patricia Alessandrini, Joanna Bailie, Richard Beaudoin and Cassandra Miller. (It also finds precedents in a wider musical interest in forms of transcription that one can find in the music of composers as diverse as Peter Ablinger, Luciano Berio and Michael Finnissy.) What makes Einbond's work distinctive is his focus on timbre as a musical parameter, rather than more abstract or easily quantifiable values such as pitch.

This article considers the ‘representation of decay’ in selected concert works by the Australian composer Cat Hope. It draws on a mixed-method research methodology, comparing the conceptual aspects of Hope's oeuvre with analyses of studio and live recordings of Hope's work and discussing how such ideas of ‘decay’ may play out in the sonic world. Two forms of spectral analysis are employed: firstly the analysis of spectral parameters roughness, noisiness, brightness, pitch, and centroid, and secondly a visualisation of the music as a spectrogram. The data for the spectral analyses are derived from Alexander Harker's spectral descriptor tools for MaxMSP which record a value for each parameter every 25 milliseconds. At times, values are normalised within a range of 0 and 1, as representative of how listeners experience parametrical changes (i.e. dynamics, in relative terms rather than absolutes in relation to other sounds in the work). Importantly, perception of noisiness is more acute at frequencies in which the auditory critical bands are wider, below 250 Hz (roughly below middle C), precisely the upper range specified by Hope to define instruments suitable for the Australian Bass Orchestra.

The aesthetic of fault, failure, breaking off or breaking down is a diverse phenomenon pervading a multitude of areas in daily life, art in general, and medial contemporary music in particular. In addition to its destructive element, an error always allows the opportunity to look behind the façade and to comprehend mechanisms in systems. As soon as a function is impaired or defective we learn more about the operations of that system – be it biology, psychology, informatics or any other branch of science – and this holds especially true for medially conveyed, digital content. In a reality increasingly capitalising on digitally transported content this viewpoint gains growing social as well as artistic poignancy. This article explores the conception and connotation of error in general and, specifically, in the field of digital media before discuss resulting implications for the arts and giving examples of how to harness their attributes. Finally, it also reflects on the author's motivation in approaching the principle of error, and reflects upon how this subject is substantially influencing my own current pieces.

Cat Hope's compositional practice is guided by a belief that music is inherently socially situated and can therefore be used as a tool for change. Through her 2019 opera Speechless Hope contributes to public discourse around the treatment of detainees in Australian offshore processing centres and engages more broadly with issues of nationality, human rights, displacement and the agency of voiceless minorities. This article demonstrates the way in which Hope presents identity in abstraction and complicates the binary of the self and the collective through musical acts of empathy. In doing so, she pioneers a new model which affords composers the ability to present progressive social arguments, crucial to a global political climate in desperate need of a recalibrated perspective of identity.

I first performed Salut für Caudwell (1977) at November Music in Den Bosch, two and half years ago. The festival celebrated Lachenmann's eightieth birthday in grand style, and the composer himself attended. During a backstage chat, Lachenmann, whom I've known for around 20 years, casually hinted that there were things ‘missing’ in the print edition of the work, published in 1985: that is, that performative information in the fair copy was not fully reproduced in the print edition. At that moment, my curiosity was piqued intensely, and the seed of a new edition was planted. While I understood the formidable challenges involved in properly preparing the part, rehearsing, and traversing this Everest of the guitar literature, I was not fully prepared for the astonishing array of hazards that awaited me. This article describes the labyrinth of sketches, drafts, and score iterations I encountered in beginning to prepare a new edition of Salut for Lachenmann's publishers, Breitkopf & Härtel.

The Lithuanian composer Egidija Medekšaitė (b. 1979) has developed a practice in which she uses the principles of textile weaving to make musical compositions. This article introduces a series of works created in the last three years in which she has refined these techniques; it also considers the nature of the relationship between the textile patterns that Medekšaitė uses as the basis for these works and the resultant music. In particular the article focuses on an analytical account of four works: Âkâsha for string orchestra (2015), the string quartet Megh Malhar (2016), a setting of the Nunc dimittis (2018), and Sattva for electronics and accordion (2018).

This article serves as an introduction to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical practices that have made use of glass instruments and objects. Emphasis is placed on those practices that use glass in a raw, acoustic manner, and those that take advantage of the precision with which glass can be tuned. First, a general history of glass music is presented, followed by an overview of the physical and acoustic aspects pertaining to the material that are relevant to those composers wishing to integrate glass into their works. Finally, the composers, performers and instrument builders who have made significant use of glass in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are surveyed.

On 27 August 2018, the first Women Composers Meeting (中堅女性作曲家サミット vol. 1) was held at the Social Business Lab in Tokyo as part of the Project PPP Summer Composition Academy. Eight Japanese women composers in their mid-thirties to early forties were invited to speak: Noriko Koide, Yu Kuwabara, Tomoko Momiyama, Chikako Morishita (moderator), Akiko Ushijima, Ai Watanabe, Yukiko Watanabe, and Akiko Yamane. This article is a compilation drawn from their three-hour discussion as well as from the opening and closing dialogues. All conversations were held in Japanese and are here translated for publication by the author with the aid of Michiko Saiki.