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.