This article considers the implications of the consideration of epistemic justice within modes of composition pedagogy in higher education and is in part a manifesto, in part a reflection on my experiences of teaching composition in this setting. I ask how composition education can become, as described in 2015 by the North Macedonian dramatist and creative educator Goran Stefanovski, ‘the politics of the impossible’. I question how composition education could function without a canon of examples or assumed master–apprentice hierarchies and frame this as a question of epistemic justice, one that considers the composers themselves as individuals prior to the technical exercises that they may undertake. I describe why I believe that epistemic justice is a concept that is worthy of consideration in creative education in composition alongside the ways that current models of composition pedagogy might unintentionally cause students to experience epistemic injustice within their education experiences. Rather than a prescriptive model, I propose challenges that I hope can influence my educational approach now and in the future and conclude with some suggestions about what a model of hermeneutic epistemic justice might look like as a pedagogic model for music composition.

Joan La Barbara's involvement in the New Wilderness Preservation Band is an often cited but virtually unknown period of her history. And yet it may have been one of the most generative periods of her early career. Drawing upon archival documents, unreleased recordings and interviews, I narrate the history of the band, including La Barbara's early use of extended vocal techniques. I argue that her work in the band reflected a mode of collaborative authorship that is often lost in retellings of her history, and that her emergence in 1974 as a composer reflected a broader tension around authorship in bands and ensembles during these years.

This article explores ways in which compositional methods can respond to and articulate the specificity of localness, interrogating ideas of place, identity, collaboration and the local through an examination of the methods used by professional Birmingham composers to open out aspects of their compositional approach to the wider community. I share my findings from for-Wards, an ambitious public music project: an artistic collaboration between myself, ten professional Birmingham composers, nine music organisations and residents from Birmingham to create a musical ode to the city. Non-conventional compositional approaches became instrumental in the development of this innovative project, documenting the experience of the local within an ambitious citywide collaboration. The article considers the for-Wards project's background, notions of the hyperlocal, the artistic team, ideas relating to authorship, the compositional framework and collaborative challenges. The article considers the collaborative compositional methods employed by the for-Wards composers to examine the local, including local histories and their playful variants, field recordings, environmental vocalisations and the visualisation of the local.

This article presents a survey of philosophical perspectives on the phenomena of ‘nature’ and ‘science/scientific’ in music and does so through a closer look at the first creative period of Péter Eötvös as a composer. Since the beginning of his creative career Eötvös has come into contact with issues scanning the relations between music and science, on the one hand, and music and nature, on the other. Considering Martin Heidegger's reflections on the nature of modern science as he articulated them in his Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938), one can recognise in Eötvös' first creative period (in works like Kosmos, Elektrochronik, Intervalles-Intérieurs, Tale, etc.) not only the motivating, inspiring force of science, but also the limits of this incentive.

This article takes a recent interview with Chaya Czernowin, ‘5 Things Harvard's Chaya Czernowin Suggests You Do as an Aspiring Composer’, as a point of departure for a series of reflections on compositional pedagogy focusing specifically on inclusion. It proposes a less restrictive definition of a ‘composer’ and a decentring of career expectations in favour of embracing a range of creative sound-making practices. It goes on to underline the importance of transnational and transcultural perspectives, of experimentation and the risk of failure, and of listening skills that transcend style and culture. In these latter two sections, specific classroom techniques are cited: Maria Chavez's creative workshop on failure, and Thea Musgrave's ‘critique’ sessions, in which students listen critically to compositions without prior knowledge of their title or author. The final section addresses the question of evaluation, positing that lowering the stakes of individual assessments encourages students to branch out and take risks. It also calls into question the weight given to forms of evaluation, such as recommendation letters, that may pose particular problems of bias. In the conclusion, it looks to recent decolonisation movements in music for models of structural changes that could help to enact the essay's propositions.

This article explores Joan La Barbara's appearance on Sesame Street with ‘The Signing Alphabet’ (1977) to engage her artistic commitments to accessibility and collaboration. The piece is an alphabet song rendered through vocal improvisation against an animation of the American Manual Alphabet by Steve Finkin. It plays with the relationships between sound, alphabets, learning and literacy, reaching new listening publics: children and their caregivers. Through the visibility it offers Deaf culture, the work generates frames through which to hear La Barbara's voice and see the limitations of her vocal extensions. The piece reveals other paths for new music in the 1970s, placing La Barbara's creativity in the context of educational programing aimed at normalising difference, especially in the context of disability, race and class. Sesame Street and Joan La Barbara, I suggest, imbue vocal extension and exploration with an ethos of care.

This article considers the nature of the relationship between composers and musicologists and explores the aesthetic roots and ideas of my 5th String Quartet, Dancers on a Plane, which has recently been the subject of a musicological study.

The Belgian new-music ensemble Nadar created a Zoom performance titled FITTINGinSIDE, which is tailored to a world in the grip of a pandemic. It balances ritual, artistic play and collective performance, all blended in a way that astonishes the ears. We followed Nadar's course through the pandemic and studied their techniques. How did Nadar manage to turn the crisis into – yet again – a new, creative starting point? How ‘live’ did the new ‘live’ feel? And is FITTINGinSIDE the format of the future?

Musical composition has traditionally been taught with the assumption that students share musical backgrounds and have similar aims. In today's highly diverse musical world, however, composition students are exposed to a multiplicity of musical languages. They develop their personal creative styles from an internal conceptual ‘melting pot’ and must also develop compositional methodologies for a potentially large array of disparate usages. This article argues that the teaching of composition should recognise both the rich global diversity of musics and the plethora of uses to which compositional techniques might be applied, and that such teaching might most productively be focused on imparting a broad selection of technical concepts from many musics, coupled with an interrogation of the underlying purposes of techniques taught. All musics must be treated as equally worthy of study and students’ embodied experiences respected. Curricula need to be designed with such a catholic view in mind, encouraging students to embrace the growing profusion of genres, techniques and resources available and develop a flexible, broadly informed and resourceful outlook.

In this interview the composer Thomas Meadowcroft discusses his radiophonic work Talkback Burnback, from its genesis and source material to its assembly. The work is placed in the wider context of Meadowcroft's earlier radiophonic works, Song Buslines (2013) and Moving Home (2016), and considered in relation to the different traditions of radiophonic works, sound art, podcasts and the Hörspiel.

This article explores Joan La Barbara's music-making in West Berlin in 1979 during her year as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm (the Artists’ Programme of the German Academic Exchange Service). It maps significant locations and describes the creative work she did at each site, arguing for inclusion of her musicking in the sonic imaginary of Cold War Berlin. It also posits the role of the Künstlerprogramm as akin to that of a sound designer, locating, distributing and spatialising her voice in the soundscape of the city.

The increasing precarity of arts academic jobs, combined with a much needed focus on equity and decolonisation, are de-privileging and destabilising the experimental music tradition and contemporary composer identity. As a result, composition departments are pursuing a paradox: scrambling to focus on specific marketable skills while also broadening the genres taught. After teaching in a composition department, a generalised arts department and a prison college programme, I describe methods to provide skills training for students interested in different genres, even if those genres are not the specialty of a department's faculty. These include: (1) discrete ‘levels’ of creative thought, from high-level questions of art's purpose to ground-level skills training; (2) creative process assignments, in which students plan and document their way through a prompt, developing a practical discipline into which desired skills can be incorporated; and (3) formal spaces for students to learn from each other, one-on-one, getting deeper into the similarities and differences they have. The goal is to empower students not simply via marketability, but by developing a sense of vocation without tethering creativity to employment, so that students may more realistically and more potently design their own lives in music.

This text was written in response to a commission from Berliner Festspiele/MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2021. Juliet Fraser collaborated with filmmaker Jessie Rodger to create an experimental video essay that layered raw footage of Juliet in her erstwhile London studio space, reading her own words, reflecting on the words of others and doing her singing practice. The result offered a glimpse into one artist's efforts to remain creative and connected during the time of Covid. What follows is the written essay; the full video essay, Inside Out, can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96xf41-_PA.

A considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.

In 2019 the present authors, along with our colleague Mic Spencer, began work on a project funded by the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence, designed to look at the ways in which we taught composition at the University of Leeds and how we might change them. Mic has focused on postgraduate teaching, and we have considered the earliest parts of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly the first two years of study, when the largest numbers of students with the least experience of the study of composition at tertiary level might be in a classroom (50 or so, in our case).