This paper, originally the keynote address at a conference on notation in contemporary music held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in October 2013, examines the relationship between notation and improvisation in today's music. Starting from the position that improvisation is a method of composition, and that the two are in no way opposites, the author reflects on his dual practice as composer of often complexly notated scores and an improvising musician. The title subverts the familiar claim that it is improvisation that liberates the musician from the supposed tyranny of fixed notation, suggesting instead that notation may serve a valuable function in suggesting possible directions or points of focus in free improvisation.

This article is an analytical study of the music of, and an interview with, the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. Her use of recordings as starting-points for several of her compositions is explored, as is her fondness for loop-based structures, which are sometimes inspired by analogous processes in the world of film. A brief overview of Miller's work to date is complemented by a close examination of several scores, notably Bel Canto, “O Zomer!” and Philip the wanderer. The concluding interview with the composer presents Miller's present musical and artistic concerns in her own words.

Indifferent to the aesthetic dispute between the Parisian musique concrète and the Cologne elektronische Musik schools in the mid twentieth century, Mauricio Kagel took a synthetic approach to his second electroacoustic composition Antithese by combining these compositional principles. His aim was not to offer an eclectic solution to the controversy, but to express his musico-political and musico-social commentary. A close observation of Kagel's sketches, archived at the Paul Sacher Foundation, suggests that his choice of compositional materials and painstaking structural plan were shaped by his critical view of the politics of electroacoustic music.

Matthias Pintscher was granted the sixth Roche Commissions award in 2012, when Sofia Gubaidulina had to withdraw at short notice. Pintscher's Roche commission, Chute d’étoiles, coincidentally received its London premiere within a few days of the UK premiere of Gubaidulina's The Rider on the White Horse. Roche deserve the thanks of the music world for their initiative, running since 2004 but hardly suffering from over-exposure. Their choice of composers has been good: Birtwistle, Benjamin, Hosokawa – and Unsuk Chin slated for 2014. The link with the Lucerne Festival and Cleveland Orchestra (which gave the world and US premieres of the Pintscher piece) is also marvellously helpful. While it's debatable whether luminaries like Sir Harrison need the exposure, the focus on the now-coming-to-major-prominence generation (Chin was born in 1961, Pintscher 10 years later) is welcome.

Considering the reputation of the Southbank Centre as a major British authority on new music and art, their playing host to ‘The New Experimentalists’ in January seemed a long time coming. From an institution one year into its twentieth-century musical extravaganza, The Rest Is Noise Festival, an evening highlighting new and recent works by four leading experimental artists came as a welcome break from an exhaustive list of twentieth-century ‘classics’.

Mark Anthony Turnage's Frieze – performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on 11 August – and Nashit Kahn's The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra – performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton on 12 August – both raise the question of how, in a new piece, one can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage's work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organisation's bicentennial and to share a programme as their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work, which is clearly modelled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in Turnage's own language on the older one. Kahn's concerto brings together an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way.

‘Why shouldn't we be allowed to write symphonic poems?’ Tristan Murail asked the audience gathered at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios for his interview with Jonathan Cross. Murail, now 67, was visiting the UK for the first time in many years, here for the world premiere of his new orchestral work Reflections, which took place on 2 November 2013 in a robust performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. Reflections parts one and two evoke certain aspects of early modernist music, and, most of all, the music of Debussy, a composer Murail has come to cite more and more frequently. This diptych premiered by the BBC SO comprises the first two parts, said Murail, of a projected cycle for orchestra of several relatively brief pieces, each of which reflects on a certain image, memory or object of personal significance to the composer.

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has, for many years, been the date in the UK new music calendar. Every November, friends and enemies gather under the heavy skies of a Yorkshire micro-climate to listen to, perform and discuss new work. When Graham McKenzie took over as Artistic Director six years ago, there were murmurings that it might change out of all recognition. He certainly made a few bold decisions, introducing more multi-media, cross-disciplinary elements, installations and audio walks, and moving beyond St Paul's Hall to more contemporary spaces like the blending shed at Bates Mill. He also gave the festival's branding the once-over, so that HCMF now always appears as hcmf// (perhaps a nod to the trendy Wire magazine-reading audience he was trying to attract). Little of what he instigated at the start of his tenure has changed, but if there were fears that it would spell the end of ‘proper concerts’, one needn't have worried.

Howard Skempton's natural habitat is outside the box. Since the late 1960s he has flown in the face of the most fashionable trends in music, initially producing small, spare, almost inscrutable pieces often covering less than a page. He has never stood still, always gently subverting the listener's conception of his music. A major shift came in 1991 with his orchestral work Lento, where not only the size of forces used, but timescale as well, moved into a new area without compromising his own personal voice. More recently he has developed a relationship with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) resulting in Only the Sound Remains for viola and ensemble (2010), lasting more than 30 minutes. With a seemingly quite traditional surface, the piece's ability to hold a series of seemingly unconnected episodes together whilst retaining a sense of continuity disguised a highly radical structure (see Calum MacDonald's review in TEMPO 253 for more details).

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival's promotion of Scandinavian and Catalan music – through established partnerships with The Danish Composers’ Society and Music Norway, and a more recent association with Catalonia's Institut Ramon Llul – have helped to bring under-represented regions for contemporary music to the foreground of the international scene.

As in previous Proms seasons, Cadogan Hall's 2013 chamber concerts series presented some of the most interesting repertoire. On 5 August, Tine Thing Helseth and her all-female brass ensemble tenThing gave the world premiere of a new piece by Diana Burrell. She has already written a substantial work for brass ensemble, Gold, dating from 2001 (which also requires 3 gongs and a piano), and her new BBC commission has a similarly punchy title capturing the bright and burnished qualities of its instrumentation – Blaze. Scored for three trumpets, flugelhorn, horn, three tenor trombones, bass trombone and tuba, this virtuosic, 10-minute showcase grabbed the audience's attention from the start with a striking, fanfare-like idea that recurred in extended form as unison chords during the closing bars, providing an incandescent coda. In a brief pre-performance talk, the composer spoke of the often-untapped technical capabilities of brass instruments, and her demanding piece successfully tapped into this potential, as she gave each performer a chance to shine within its teeming textures. In addition to these challenging solo episodes, the score was memorable for its inventive deployment of various combinations of instruments, denoting a genuinely chamber-oriented work. Blaze provided a strong focal point for a programme that otherwise consisted solely of arrangements, nearly all by guitarist Jarle Storløkken, of repertoire originally conceived for other forces, such as piano pieces by Grieg and excerpts from Carmen and The Threepenny Opera.

Robin Holloway's brief illustrative list of composers who populate the ‘continuing or reconstructed mainstream’ begins in Britain, with ‘Tippett and Britten, hence Maw and both Matthewses’ and ends with the broader international sweep of ‘Takemitsu, Knussen and Lieberson (stemming equally from serialism à la Berg and à la late Stravinsky); hence Lindberg, Benjamin, Turnage, Anderson, Adès and all’. Whilst these groupings, which position David Matthews and Thomas Adès towards opposing ends of the continuum, might be inadvertent, the premieres of their latest works, given over consecutive (and swelteringly hot) nights in July, would appear to strengthen such a polarity.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' Tenth Symphony was given its premiere by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at the Barbican on 2 February 2014. The work concerns itself with both the architecture and the death of Francesco Borromini; while perhaps an unusual subject for a symphony, there is precedence in Maxwell Davies's work, as the same man is the subject of his Third Naxos Quartet, and the Third Symphony takes Brunelleschi as its subject. Maxwell Davies has suggested direct links between Borromini's creations and his own – in the programme note we discover that ‘the precise parameters and proportions by which a huge basilica of Borromini's was constructed’ control portions of the work – and indeed the architect's presence pervades the symphony. As well as guiding Maxwell Davies's constructive parameters in the instrumental movements, Borromini is the subject of the chorus' music throughout and almost becomes a character in an operatic scena in the final passage, as he plays out his own suicide to the backdrop of the chorus intoning the names of his most celebrated work. Yet this new symphony rarely betrays its rigorous origins, and aside from passages for percussion mimetic of building activity (hammers, vibraphone, anvils and so on) many aspects in fact suggest a softer, smoother musical language.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival ended with a folk-themed Sunday, to draw together the interests from the Danish and Norwegian representations with British musical cultures, and to provide a markedly different end to this year's festival than others recent. As an audience member, I found that the focus upon learning activities, free concerts and vernacular and improvisatory approaches to music-making provided a strong feeling of community throughout the day. Danish fiddler Poul Bjerager Christiansen, who coordinated the morning's traditional dance workshop, stated that we can choose to see traditional music as a base for creating new music; it is clear that Graham McKenzie wants to see it as a base for creating new festival environments, in which we are invited to explore and make our own connections.