The concerto form is well represented in James MacMillan's output. So far, he has written three for piano, two for percussion and one each for violin, viola, cello, trumpet, oboe and clarinet. There is also threaded through his output a series of concertante works, such as A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, for violin, ensemble and tape (2003), A Scotch Bestiary, for organ and orchestra (2004) and the concertino Seraph, for trumpet and strings (2010). All share a common concern to realise fully the soloist's expressive potential.

This year's Proms prospectus was the sixth to bear Roger Wright's name at the bottom of the preface, and under his aegis the Proms have taken on a non-doctrinaire openness that have seen some refreshing programming choices, among them Langgaard's wonderfully weird Music of the Spheres in 2010 and his six-minute Eleventh Symphony (complete with four concertante tubas) in 2012; between them, in 2011, came the most important of all maverick works, Brian's Gothic Symphony, almost tailor-made for the Proms and, more importantly, one of music's masterpieces. In the 37 years of my experience of the Proms (I went to my first one in 1977, God help me) new music has followed a longer-term but essentially similar trend of what one might call disindoctrination, as composers have increasingly felt free to write what they wanted to write rather than what they were expected to write. In my early Promming days you expected to have to fight for your new music: most of it inhabited varying degrees of uncompromising modernism.

Contemporary works are often a feature of the BBC orchestras’ annual Proms concerts, attracting considerable media attention. However, each of these orchestras programmes a wide variety of new music throughout the year, most of which receives significantly less extensive coverage by the national press. Their Autumn 2013 schedules, for example, contained several first performances, some from composers on the threshold of a professional career, others from more established figures, all deserving to be widely reported.

The string quartet retains the pull of intimacy and the promise of prestige it has held for composers since the late eighteenth century. Unlike, say, the historically over-determined piano sonata, there is a degree of flexibility and adaptability in the form that has allowed a wide range of modern composers, from Xenakis to Shostakovich to Rihm, to make distinctive marks on it.

The Bangor New Music Festival has taken place annually at Bangor University School of Music since its inception in 2000. It is the only festival dedicated to new music in North Wales, and its programme typically encompasses a diverse range of styles and types of performance, including events curated by Electroacoustic Wales, an organisation that ‘exists to promote and encourage the creation and dissemination of electroacoustic music within Wales and beyond’, and which is also based at the University.

There is a certain audacity to four young curators adopting the title ‘London Contemporary Music Festival’ for their first large-scale collective venture. For a festival that deliberately sets out to sidestep the musical establishment, there's an aspect of calculated provocation in the appropriation of a title that would seem to be the preserve of that establishment. The gesture, however, goes some way further than staking a symbolic claim. At the same time as the curators (Aisha Orazbayeva, Sam Mackay, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Lucy Railton, in collaboration with the commissioning body Bold Tendencies, based at the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park) have effectively bypassed the establishment networks and funding structures, they have set out a clear alternative narrative about how contemporary music may yet be practised and understood.

It's not the premiere of every Polish symphony that's greeted by a near sell-out audience at the Royal Festival Hall, but then it's not every composer whose previous symphony had the success of Henryk Górecki's Third, his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The Upshaw/London Sinfonietta/Zinman recording of this work has sold over a million copies.

In basing his first opera on Sophocles' Thebans trilogy, heard at the ENO on 3 May 2014 in a condensed three-act version, one act per play, Julian Anderson shows his colours as something of a classicist. No postmodern pastiche nor quasi-medieval dramatic innovations for him, as we've seen from near British contemporaries Mark-Anthony Turnage and George Benjamin, nor the technological and dramaturgical explorations of other recent ENO productions, from Two Boys to Satyagraha to A Dog's Heart. No, this is a composer with his feet firmly planted in the grand operatic tradition of classical subjects and traditional telling.

The Kreutzer Quartet's ‘Beethoven Begins’ series, based around the great German master's Op.18 string quartets, has included an example of new music in each of its six concerts, a tribute to the players’ eclectic tastes, versatility and accomplishment in diverse repertoire. Their generously filled programmes all take place within the flaky grandeur of Wilton's Music Hall, one of London's quirkiest and most bewitching venues.

This concert at the Bridgewater Hall, by the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Tecwyn Evans, featured three world premieres commissioned by MIF 2013 from the late John Tavener, together with Mahamatar from 2000 (featuring Sufi singer Abida Parveen, following a rare UK appearance the previous evening, and performed to a screening of Werner Herzog's 2001 film Pilgrimage) and his 1968 choral piece In Alium.

Thirteen concerts, eight world premieres, 15 French premieres, 36 composers and some of the top performers, ensembles and conductors in the new music world – yes, Festival Présences had swung back round, like the February hail or the latest season of Big Brother, albeit much more welcome. The theme for Présences's twenty-fourth incarnation seemed at first sight an awkward one: ‘Paris–Berlin’. As themes go, was it not uninspired to just lump two capital cities together, eliciting our suspicion that it was based on the mundane fact that most of the composers happen to live in one of these two cities?

Ultraschall, jointly presented by Deutschlandradio Kultur and Kulturradio vom RBB (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg), and this year officially renamed Ultraschall Berlin, has been a fixture of the city's concert life since 1999. Festival directors Rainer Pöllmann (Deutschlandradio Kultur) and Andreas Göbel (replacing Margarete Zander for Kulturradio vom RBB) chose to emphasise the two major broadcasters' partnership this year with what they called a ‘duo idea’ running through the festival's programme. Illustrating this theme, orchestral concerts (a pair) opened and closed the festival, the project New Forum Jeune Création paired each of three ensembles with two young composers, and performing duos included GranSchumacher Piano Duo, Claudia Barainsky and Axel Bauni in a concert for voice and piano, and a concert of string duos by members of Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin (who were however not appearing as representatives of this ensemble) with the featured composer/zither player Leopold Hurt, to name but a few. Additionally, a so-called epilogue after the festival's official ending was paired with something that one might have called a prologue, seemingly tacked on as an afterthought: an evening of Klangkunst, electro-acoustic music and performance entitled ‘Art's Birthday’ presented works by Hanna Hartman, Jana Winderen and Nicolas Bernier at the hub of Berlin's club culture, Berghain. Though internationally known in the techno scene for drugs, dancing and dark rooms, Berghain has also long been used as a venue for contemporary and experimental music concerts. The otherwise conservative choices of venue (Radialsystem V, Haus des Rundfunks, and HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) Theatres) and programme – Ultraschall sees itself more as a repertoire-establishing festival, with an emphasis not on premieres but on second and third performances alongside ‘masterpieces’ of contemporary and modern music – made this first concert appear a half-hearted jumping on the ‘new contexts’ bandwagon. And, alongside the repeated, excited announcements of the festival now having its own website (yes in 2014!), there was something of the sense of embarrassment one feels as a teenager bumping into one's parents at a night club.

John McCabe is most closely associated with large-scale orchestral statements, notably in concertante and symphonic forms and in ballet scores, yet chamber and instrumental music has recently played an increasingly significant role within his oeuvre. Of his vocal music, unaccompanied choral works such as the carols have attracted most attention, whilst his major contributions to the choral-orchestral repertoire, such as the large-scale cantata, Voyage (1972) and the extended song cycle for soloists, choir and large orchestra, Songs of the Garden (both Three Choirs Festival commissions, for 1972 and 2009, respectively), are considerably less widely known. It was with keen anticipation and no little curiosity, then, that I attended the first performance of McCabe's latest work for chorus and orchestra on 16 March 2013 at St John's, Smith Square.

Clicks haunt much of Michel van der Aa's music, often embedded in thick referential networks. In One, the pervasive clicks, both live and pre-recorded, sometimes come from a flashlight and sometimes from twigs snapping; similarly, in Sunken Garden, a character in the film nervously flicks a business card against his hand, this minor gesture imbuing the score with one of its most distinctive sounds. But in both these compositions (and in many other van der Aa works) the clicks share another connotation: they are also the awkward, glitchy sound of recorded music, either gone wrong or mid-edit. It's an unmistakable reference for twenty-first-century ears – our experience with recordings has changed the way we hear the click.

It would be simplistic to suggest that contemporary classical music exists solely within or around large institutions. For at least 50 years now, this music has also found a home in small galleries, loft spaces and basements, and other small, independent venues around the world, as seen for example in the Downtown New York scene. London venue Cafe Oto – operating out of a warehouse in Dalston since 2008 – runs on similar principles to specialist Downtown venues such as the Stone, in that it boasts a wide-ranging multi-genre programme focused on various experimental and avant-garde musics, such as noise, free jazz, and contemporary classical.

Sciarrino's two-act chamber opera Luci mie traditrici is based on the true story of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo's brutal murder of his wife and her lover. Numerous composers in the last 50 years or so have been sufficiently fascinated by Gesualdo to write works based on his life or music, including seven operas appearing in the last two decades. Sciarrino based his libretto on a drama written only 50 years after Gesualdo's death by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini. This UK premiere conducted by Michael Rafferty was given at the Buxton Festival by Music Theatre Wales, translated into English by Paola Loreto (and set to the music by Kit Hesketh-Harvey) as The Killing Flower.

Since 1972, the Parisian Festival d'Automne has organised dozens of events every year in the field of theatre, dance and music. The list of premieres is impressive, and comprises all the major names in the realm of contemporary art. The concerts represent a kind of anthology of recent outstanding achievements, combined with commissions from younger composers, and a recapitulation of important works of twentieth-century music which may be mentioned in every music history but are rarely performed: this year, for instance, featured Karlheinz Stockhausen's Trans. Offering a precious and vital complement to the other various Parisian seasons, the Festival has no venue of its own, so that, as quite a number of the concerts are co-produced with other institutions, the ‘visibility’ of the festival stems only from the quality of the programming, the excellence of the musicians, and the interaction with the overall artistic project.

There was a pleasantly informal atmosphere at The Print Room during the premiere run of Opera Erratica's new Triptych this May. Comprising three short operas for voices and electronics, Triptych presented a new interpretation of contemporary chamber opera, incorporating elements of multimedia – including live video and photographic projections – alongside elements of more traditional art forms, such as a strikingly cartoonish set by the Young British Artist Gavin Turk.