When Bill Hopkins died of a massive heart attack in March 1981, at the age of 37, the loss was immense, not only for his family and friends, but also for the music world at large. Those who have actually listened to his music (they are fewer than one would suppose) have judged that his potential was huge, one commentator being ‘sure he would have become a considerable force, comparable perhaps with Pierre Boulez’. However, rather than a dismissal of his work as promise unfulfilled, more appropriate would be a celebration of the startling achievement his completed works in fact represent – as I hope this article, and further performances, will demonstrate.

Travelling to Paris in September 1964, the French Government having enabled me to present myself at the Conservatoire as a prospective pupil of Messiaen, I brought with me the ambition to meet Jean Barraque. He was, above all else, the composer of a Sonata, to a recording of which I had listened repeatedly, intently, and with an overwhelming apprehension of living greatness. If music meant anything today, only here was that meaning fully grasped, and it was to a like ideal that my own work falteringly aspired.

Well, I've been collaborating with my wiie, the video artist Beryl Korot. Her work involves multi-channel video where the timings between the channels are very highly worked out – four channels where the first and third and the second and fourth would be interlocked – very musicaltype structures. So it was a natural collaboration, but the question was, what's it all about? In a few minutes we decided it would be the Cave of Machpela. Beryl and I had both become interested in our own Judaic backgrounds and had both begun studying the Torah. We discovered that there's a town in a very politically sensitive area of the world, Hebron, thirty miles south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, where Abraham is accepted to be buried by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Whether he's there or not is really immaterial. I think part of the decision to choose the Cave of Machpela was that, on a political level and as a human being living in the world today, I don't think you can understand what's going on in the Middle East unless you understand the Biblical and the Koranic level of the conflict – otherwise you miss the base on which it all stands.

The new music summer school in Darmstadt is perhaps the most important gathering of and performers of contemporary music in Europe. Launched in 1946 in the then American Zone of occupied Germany, as part of the postwar process of internationalization (and, therefore, de-Nazification) of German culture, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse quickly gained a reputation as a forum for the promulgation of a radically abstract musical aesthetic, based on reductive analyses of the serial works of Webern in particular. While some composers saw this new aesthetic as a ‘mechanistic heresy’, the music of what came to be known as the Darmstadt School – Boulez, Maderna, Nono, Stockhausen – soon attracted official support since, like Abstract Expressionist painting, ‘a seemingly abstract art could readily be elevated as an emblem of “terrible freedom”’. This ‘terrible freedom’, the freedom to be unpopular, was a potent symbol of Western individualism in the symbolic battle that characterized the European theatre of the Cold War during the 1950s.

The German composer Dieter Schnebel was born in March 1930, in Lahr, Baden. He began serious piano studies at the age of 10, and made his first attempts at composition around the end of the war, in his mid-teens. His principal music studies took place at the Musik Hochschule, Freiburg from 1949 to 1952; having encountered the music of Hindemith in 1949, he became aware of Bartók, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School during the early 1950s, and studied at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, where he came into contact with Krenek, Varèse, Adorno, Henze, Nono and Boulez.

• Just Another ‘Lulu’ Robin Holloway

• Virgil Thomson's ‘Lord Byron’ Rodney Lister

• Elisabeth Lutyens on NMC Robert Saxton

• John Foulds on Lyrita Raymond Head

• Wood, Casken and Holt David Murray

• US Symphonies: Diamond and Bolcom Bret Johnson

• 20th-century Quartet cycles Guy Rickards

• Modern Americans: Kraft, Tower and Welcher Bret Johnson

• Maciejewski and Szymanowski Martin Anderson

• Villa-Lobos CDs and book Guy Rickards

• Harvey's ‘Inquest of Love’ Malcolm Miller

• Almeida Opera: Volans etc. Michael Blake

• The Garden Venture Alwynne Pritchard

• Birtwistle at Full Blast John Warnaby

• Alternative Vienna (1) Malcolm Miller

• Alternative Vienna (2) Robin Freeman

• ‘The Cave’ at the South Bank Robert Cowan