Kevin Volans achieved remarkable fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Kronos Quartet's recordings of White Man Sleeps and Hunting:Gathering. With record-breaking album sales, he was perhaps even one of the most accessible twentieth-century composers operating outside of the popular or film music spheres. Thirty years later, his position could not be more different. Volans's controversial 2016 keynote at the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland, entitled ‘If You Need an Audience, We Don't Need You’, announced most vehemently his current stance in its Babbittean (or, more accurately perhaps, Feldmanesque) denouncement of populism and the music industry. For him, the tactics of publicists and marketers engender a breakdown in respect between audience and composer, while short-form works required by festivals are the epitome of a composition culture in regression.

This article is a response, informed by my own recent experience of tertiary education in the UK, as well as my work as a composer, performer, researcher and activist, to the collection of articles published in TEMPO 292 addressing issues of diversity in music-making and tertiary music education in Australia. Though interventions have been successful in achieving better gender representation across musical contexts in Australian higher education institutions, I bring into question the long-term legitimacy of such empirical or revisionist approaches. Drawing on a range of feminist, poststructural, queer, and decolonial thought, I explore how conventional approaches to tertiary music education – both in terms of pedagogical methods, as well as assumed or prioritised content – enforce hegemonic and exclusionary value systems, hierarchies, ontologies and epistemologies. I also problematise some of the ways in which neoliberal and capitalist frameworks have become embedded within tertiary music education and advocate a process of destabilising and decentring assumed parameters, outlining how a critical, political and radical approach to music education might look.

PIXERCISE (2017–) is an open-ended collaborative work written by Kathryn Williams and Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh. The piece involves an ongoing process of physical training, and in performance combines specially tailored physical exercises with piccolo performance. This article describes the unusual composition, preparation, and performance of this work and is concerned with exploring the shifting collaborative relationship. It also explores some of the aesthetic and social ideas that motivated the piece and have emerged through critical reflection and have been further incorporated, including the process of self-improvement and overcoming expressed as a performance artwork; entanglements between physical transformation through exercise; attitudes to female-body image and exercise; and how this piece connects with a growing tradition of experimental musical performance practice and performance art.

This article forms part of ‘The Microtonal Piano – and the tuned-in interpreter’, an ongoing artistic research project at the Norwegian Academy of Music that seeks to demonstrate how microtonality can increase the expressive possibilities of the acoustic piano. Many different modes of playing can result in microtonal sounds, and this article presents a preliminary overview of these possibilities. For the project, new works have been commissioned from several composers, and different aspects of microtonal modes of playing are integrated into these works. Multiphonics is obviously one of these modes of playing, as it most often results in microtonality. At the end of the article, different ways that multiphonics can be modified when used in combination with some of the other microtonal modes of playing are suggested.

Located at the end of a quiet side street in the middle of Birmingham, the CBSO centre is the venue for many of BCMG's concerts throughout the year. If the venue seems somewhat hidden away, concealed behind a Victorian red brick façade, the music that takes place inside is certainly not insular. As one of the world's leading contemporary music ensembles, BCMG's longstanding commitment to commissioning new work, and to fostering relationships with composers, has continued since 2016 under the artistic directorship of Stephan Meier. The final UK concert of 2019, Migrating Sounds, provides clear evidence of the ensemble's aims. Of the four works performed, Richard Causton's Transients and Vito Žuraj's Tension for two ensembles were world premieres, Rebecca Saunders’ Scar was a UK premiere, and Shiori Usui's Deep was commissioned by BCMG in 2014. The pieces by Causton and Saunders were also ‘sound investment commissions’, part funded by many individuals who, in return for their support, receive various rewards, including rehearsal and reception invitations. The concert was conducted by Michael Wendeberg.

This article transcribes an interview with the great Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and is one of the last interviews that Penderecki gave before his death on 29 March 2020. It traces the composer's career, from his early musical education to the Ninth Symphony on which he was working at the time of his death, and focuses on the composition of his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, the St Luke Passion and the Polish Requiem.

Oral history is experiencing something of a heyday in the public imagination. The past ten years have seen a proliferation of podcasts – Sarah Koenig's Serial, Brian Reed's S-Town, Jon Ronson's The Butterfly Effect – which revolve around the testimony of ordinary people. Many of their fictional counterparts, most overtly Archive 81, hinge around the very practice of documenting, archiving and interpreting oral histories. BBC radio's oral history The Century Speaks (1999) was broadcast to an audience of millions. In the same year, radio historian Susan Douglas presciently called for a return to orality: ‘a mode of communication reliant on storytelling, listening, and group memory’. Common to these cultural products is a desire to capture a zeitgeist in a peculiarly direct and interpersonal way: through the intimacy of hearing a witness's own voice, oral history media eludes writing and embraces the subjectivity of the spoken and unscripted. To listen to somebody's testimony is to foster a distinctive relationship with them and their past, to receive it in their words and in some sense relive it on their terms.

Guillaume Connesson is a French composer widely performed across Europe and the US, but almost entirely unheard in the UK, in concert or broadcast. The article ‘Glimmers in a Dark Age’ (TEMPO 73/288 (2019), 70–80) was my attempt to introduce a British audience to a composer whose work I find compelling, beautifully crafted and worthy of wider attention.

A man and a woman fall in love: of all operatic clichés, this is surely one of the most perennial. However, even before the curtain was raised at the Deutsche Oper, there were indications that there was much more to Heart Chamber than this simplification might suggest. Indeed, the trajectory of Chaya Czernowin's previous three operas, beginning with Pnima … Ins Innere (1998–99), followed by Zaïde / Adama (2004–05) and most recently Infinite Now (2016), which was reviewed in issue 282 of this publication, shows that this is a composer who seeks to explore and question the very nature of opera whenever she works within the genre.

Natural harmonics, i.e. partials and their harmonic series, may be isolated on a vibrating string by lightly touching specific points along its length. In addition to the two endpoints, stationary nodes for a given partial n present themselves at n − 1 locations along the string, dividing it into n parts of equal length. It is not the case, however, that touching any one of these nodes will necessarily isolate the nth partial and its integer multiples. The subset of nodes that will activate the nth partial (termed playable nodes by the authors) may be derived by following a mathematically predictable pattern described by so-called Farey sequences. The authors derive properties of these sequences and connect them to physical phenomena. This article describes various musical applications: locating single natural harmonics, forming melodies of neighbouring harmonics, sounding multiphonic aggregates, as well as predicting the relative tuneability of just intervals.

The thirty-second Wien Modern was an extraordinary month-long festival of concerts and events with almost 90 world and Austrian premieres. The excellent Klangforum Wien programme at the Wiener Konzerthaus, conducted by Bas Wiegers, was well attended by an enthusiastic and mostly young-ish audience, where the focus was two first performances for large ensemble: Klaus Lang's linea mundi and Mirela Ivičević's Sweet Dreams. The evening was, in fact, billed as being ‘in honour’ of Ivičević who had won the Erste Bank Composition Prize 2019 with this piece. Ivičević is a Croatian composer now living in Vienna and her work shows an involvement with big themes: politics, diversity and violence, among others. Apart from concert pieces she works with different media and takes by-products of popular trash culture often as a starting point for her work. In interviews she has talked about the ‘subversive potency of sound’, and said that her work is ‘raw, imperfect, unpolished’, which this piece, and other recent examples you can hear on YouTube, demonstrate, despite her quite rigorous musical education in Zagreb and Vienna. Sweet Dreams is a lively, noisy, busy piece about the rapid change between sleep and waking states. The large ensemble, including harmonium, electric guitar and harp, opens with monumental repeated sections, dramatic but with a sense of direction toward slow, strong, pedal entries. Rough punctuation from alto saxophone, bass clarinet and trumpet adds to the ‘rawness’ but the writing is assured with a particular, individual imagination and sense of colour that bodes well for future work.

In two nights in New York, I saw three world premieres and four other recent pieces at two very different concerts. Friday, 15 November at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn was the concert FOR, the first of two nights called FOR/WITH curated by the trumpeter Nate Wooley. The venue was celebrating the life of its late founder, the artist Suzanne Fiol, and her work was displayed around the hall with an appropriate sense of reverence and intensity. Wooley featured a composer I admire, Eva-Maria Houben of the Wandelweiser collective, and an uncharacteristic solo trumpet piece that she wrote for him called chanting ballads. Like most of Houben's work it was stark, simple and repetitive, and seemed to place the performer in a battle with himself, its briefly sustained tones becoming daunting events, spaced as far apart from each other as they were. Unlike most of Houben's work, it took advantage of the trumpet's entire range of pitch and dynamic, which at first seems to be entirely out of place with the atmosphere of the work, but, as it goes on, one of course realizes that this is the point and there is so much in these bare, somewhat awkward trumpet sounds to listen for. Every extraneous sound – both from the trumpet and from the hall – becomes part of the piece. My mind moves to curation: does Houben's music demand more control over a concert? No phones maybe? I feel for the performer: while the work does what I love most about solo works, which is to take us out of the regular ‘concert’ feeling and give us the sense that we're witnessing a ritual with a strange tool, I then end up focusing on the performer's unintentional ornamentation. A few clammed notes: are they supposed to illustrate the fragility of the instrument, its tone and its user, or are they also intended as part of any tool's thorough exploration? I've played Houben: it's hard. I get it. But I do think the point is to be charitable as a listener and enjoy every sound equally, in an attempt to divorce oneself from preconceived notions of ‘successful’ playing. What at first seemed like quite an awkward undertaking became an empowering experience for me, and, one hopes, for Wooley as well.