The music of British-Albanian composer Thomas Simaku (b. 1958) bears the hallmarks of both his formative training and working life in Albania, and the widening of musical palette that came with his move to the UK in 1991. In this article the music from the late 1990s to the present day is considered, with particular attention to more recent works. An overview of some stylistic and technical aspects of this music is offered through analytical observations centred on three dualities: simplicity and complexity, the individual and the group, and stasis and movement. This wide-ranging account aims to open the door for further scholarship around this rich and multifaceted music.

This article examines the music of composer Helen Grime. It discusses her use of melodic and harmonic materials derived from a Bothy Ballad in Two Eardley Pictures. It analyzes the frequent use of interpenetration and stratification in her music, and the morphing of motivic material via a number of transformations in her Violin Concerto. Finally, the article discusses the narrative quality found in Grime's Piano Concerto.

Stockhausen's idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs, and the vigour with which he expressed them in his compositional processes, have sometimes been an obstacle to both musicians and audiences in engaging with his music. I explore the extent to which the ability to appreciate Stockhausen's music is predicated on a sympathy with his spiritual world view. I pose a broad view of Stockhausen's spirituality, not reliant on theism, through drawing on three key sources: the composer's own commentary on spirituality and its connections with his serialist compositional techniques; Rudolf Otto's notions of an intrinsically human awareness of ‘the holy’; and the connections of mathematics with human truth drawn by Alain Badiou. I argue that a broader understanding of Stockhausen's spirituality enables a pathway into his music that can be shared by both theists and atheists, and that this can produce a rich fodder for each in their curiosity about human place in the world.

Touching Sound, a symposium hosted by Sound Practice and Research at City, University of London and IKLECTIK Art Lab in 2017, aimed to explore the deeply embodied experience that is hearing and listening and add to this ever-growing field of practice and research. Composers and artists, a ceramicist, a landscape architect, and a surgeon considered the tactile experience from an open perspective, including the political, social and aesthetic. Interest in exploring touch and the tactile in relation to music and sound has grown in both practice and research. Until recently the discourse was predominantly centred on the integration of haptics with sound technology and ways in which music ‘touches’ us emotionally. Changing approaches to multi-modal experiences, often underpinned by phenomenology, and developing technological possibilities have, however, given rise to more embodied and tactile approaches to thinking about and creating music.

The British composer Gwyn Pritchard turned 70 in 2018. The present article offers the first substantial overview of Pritchard's life and work from his earliest public compositions of the late 1960s to some of his most recent music. His early life, training and periods of self-study are covered, as well as his time as founder-director of the Uroboros Ensemble. The second half of the article offers some insights into Pritchard's methods – particularly his use of permutating six-number series to generate pitch material – revealed in conversation with the composer and supported by unpublished pre-compositional materials.

Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970) is one of the most widely performed living French composers, but his work is hardly programmed in Britain. He is well represented in commercial recordings and has been championed by the conductor Stéphane Denève across Europe and the United States. His music is in a post-minimalist, quasi-tonal language that is both engaging and contemporary, and he places himself in the firmly in the ‘musical family’ of French composers.

This article considers the ways that we might rethink our relationship to musical tools and discusses some possible implications for re-thinking these human/non-human intra-actions. I refer to my own experience as a flute player to examine the body's relationship to air and whether this can be considered to be a form of touch. In doing so I have referenced trans-cultural perspectives in order to show that specific musical practices can structure human experience in very different ways.

As my own practice as a performer has evolved, I have found myself seeking out new forms of collaboration, hoping to fuel my development and increase my sense of agency. This is, in some ways, a high-risk strategy: collaborative practices are, after all, a journey into the unknown precisely because of the bringing together of discrete elements, and with meaningful sharing comes vulnerability. What I hadn't anticipated was how many conversations I would find myself having about the ways in which the traditional models of, for example, commissioning, promotion, authorship or payment fail to serve, let alone nurture, true collaboration. This short article is a re-working of a position paper I presented at Southampton University in February 2019 as part of a Hartley Residency there that I used to explore the hot topic of ‘collaboration’. The main part of my residency was a paper I wrote entitled ‘The voice that calls the hand to write: exploring the adventure of agency and authorship within collaborative partnerships’. That paper was an opportunity for me to dig into what this buzziest of words, ‘collaboration’, actually means and to organise some of my thinking on the topic. What follows here is a gentle and rather personal musing on why and how we might want to share the spoils of a shared practice, and what some of the institutional obstacles to this desire might be.

This article examines the techno-philosophical aspects of how we create and understand musical systems in twenty-first century computational media. Arguing that processor-based media have exploded the compositional language of new music, the article proposes a set of concepts that might help us navigate this new space of instrumental possibilities. The term ‘ergodynamics’ – and related concepts – is proposed as a useful concept when describing the phenomenological, historical and aesthetic aspects of musical instruments, as well as a lens for looking at new compositional practices that can be defined as being either ‘idiomatic’ or ‘supra-instrumental’. The article explores the difference in composing for acoustic, electronic and digital instruments, and suggests that new musical practice can be characterised by a move from composing work to inventing systems.

This article is based on keynote presentations that the author gave in December 2015 at the New Emergences conference at Splendor, Amsterdam, and in June 2018 at the Gender and Diversity in Music-Making conference at Monash University, Australia.

Although it is a mistake to believe that the material traces left by a composer's practice can help us to properly reconstruct the creative process, compositional sketches may throw light on it. Nevertheless many such accounts take their respective case studies as isolated objects that are, unfortunately, sometimes decontextualised from the whole record of their authors. Ethnography potentially offers a better methodology and auto-ethnographic accounts, third party observations, and mixtures of these approaches have already been applied to contemporary music. This article aims to combine both these approaches in a discussion of a recent compositional project at IRCAM, carried out by a team of three people. I consider how the previous artistic experiences and achievements of these people, jointly and separately, have had a substantial impact on their shared project. In addition, as the case study had a scientific underpinning, I comment on the cognitive bridge that the composer had to build between scientific and musical conceptions.

This article reviews a recent wave of literature on the resurgence of vinyl records, examining what it has claimed about vinyl's capacity for tangibility and the contrast to digital media, associated with intangibility. These claims are explained with reference to other literatures on touch, and it is suggested that vinyl's haptics mediates and embodies the emotionally rewarding production of a sense of self. The apparent contrast of vinyl aesthetics with classical music aesthetics is also discussed, and the presence of contemporary classical music within the vinyl resurgence is considered.

In parallel to London's overflowing cityscape, saturated on this occasion by both a bitterly cold torrential downpour and the annual frenzied crowding of materialistic festivity, the penultimate event to the city's Contemporary Music Festival was underway just after 7pm on Saturday 15 December 2018 in the cavernous Ambika P3 venue, a 14,000 square foot performing and exhibition space located on basement level to the University of Westminster's Marylebone Campus.

Unfolding over ten days in September 2018, this year's edition of Ultima was centred on the theme of migration, with a focus on both music and people. In his preface to the festival programme, Thørbjorn Tønder Hansen, the new artistic director, writes, ‘The borders of contemporary music are happily eroding, and the scene is in constant flux’. Responding to the multiple pressures of asylum seekers in Europe, demographic inequities in the representation of artists and composers, and the growing collective sense that ‘New Music’ is on the cusp of some kind of significant re-orientation, Hansen and his curatorial team produced a significant accomplishment by bringing together such a varied selection of programming. The range of installations included symphonic work; multi-channel acousmatic pieces with live diffusion to performance pieces with new applications of technology; and experimental theatre pieces set inside the black box or at a rugged outdoor setting far beyond Oslo's city limits. Ultima tipped its cap to just about anything that could set foot within the expanded terrain of ‘music composition’ today.

Touch is world-directed, temporally extended, exploratory contact and movement. It was by modelling his theory of perception on touch that Alva Noë was able to show (in Action in Perception, 2006) that perceptual experience acquires content through our physical interactions with the world, that the detail we perceive in the world ‘is experienced by us as out there, not as in our minds’ (p. 33). In this essay, I share some thoughts on how understanding musical experience on these terms, as touch-like, may be a useful means of looking past the work-concept to the wider field of musical possibilities beyond. I begin by briefly considering the phenomenology of touch, which serves as the basis for the argument that follows.

Zubin Kanga has about as wide a range of performance experience as one can get playing recently written art music – his bio mentions collaborations with contemporary warhorses like Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, and Steve Reich – but as a solo performer he has cultivated a distinctive and specialised practice that maps onto the wider action of international New Music in increasingly fascinating ways. For the past few years, his solo tours have showcased an expanded practice which binds the performer to one or another technological apparatus that centrally determines the form and execution of the piece, raising questions of autonomy, authorship and identity. These concerns are reflected in the titles of the tours: ‘Dark Twin’, ‘Cyborg Pianist’ and, currently, ‘Piano Ex Machina’.

ECLAT, Stuttgart's ever-expanding midwinter Festival, has grown to be one of the most promising German happenings of the scene by focusing on fresh blood and gender parity. This year's specifically marketed ambition was to push the boundaries in terms of concert setting, audience participation and politics. While this attempt was more curious than successful, the festival generally managed to present interesting works while avoiding any cataclysmic failures – a feat of sorts for a festival presenting 37 premieres.