Darmstadt was a bit different this year. The original 1946 courses had 120 registered participants in situ; I was told that the number this time around was larger (around 140), but only just. As an announcement for the final post-concert wrap stated, these were the COVID-19 courses. So: much smaller, much more concentrated, with almost every performance streamed online, and every other seat in the concert hall marked off with a weird sort of police tape with the Darmstadt logo on it. It's difficult to write about these things without lapsing into world-historical rhetorical posturing, as if the best lens to view the series of overlapping catastrophes we are living through is a biannual summer course for what, for better or worse, continues to be referred to as new music.

Contemporary music festivals are a neatly packaged way of encountering a variety of new and recent pieces, where someone else has done the hard work and chosen them for you. In our online/streaming life, rather than surfing Bandcamp or similar and following our own predilections, these festivals, in a healthy way, force you to confront your musical barriers and to harmonise your prejudices. In the UK and Ireland, Ilan Volkov's Glasgow Tectonics, Eamon Quinn's Louth and Graham McKenzie's Huddersfield seem to me the most interesting at the moment. There are, of course, other useful and enterprising festivals: some are a mixed bag of old and new, some are composer-led or have other agendas, so they have built-in filtering – in other words, prejudices. Festival directors have their likes and dislikes too, I guess, but the evidence from the three mentioned above demonstrates an openness and a researched risk-taking: Huddersfield, with McKenzie in charge, is more open than most, presenting quite a range of different genres and media.

While an atmosphere of reconnection has inevitably surrounded many recent concert experiences, the sense of reunion in the sixteenth-century surroundings of St Michael le Belfrey – in the shadow of York Minster – on this early autumn evening was more tangible than usual. Friends, colleagues and followers of Vic Hoyland were that night finally able to gather, nearly a year later than originally planned, to celebrate the 75th birthday of a composer who has spent more than five decades of his life carving a distinctive path through the British music scene.

At its beginning Houses Slide is raised from complete darkness by 16 cyclists. Their pedalling powers the show; its constant woosh is the pedal point against which Laura Bowler's music is played. Both impressive and absurd, pedalling fast but getting nowhere, these cyclists are an apt symbol for the questions that Houses Slide raises. This London Sinfonietta commission explores the consciousness of the ecologically conscious. At the heart of the piece lies a paradox that has become part of our collective and personal anxiety. We are repeatedly told two contradictory things: that our actions are utterly disastrous (for example, heating the world, killing the whales) and, at the same time, that they are too insignificant to create positive change. How can we be simultaneously so dangerous and so ineffective? And what can we (guilty yet useless creatures as we are) do? These are the questions that come to mind as we listen to the recorded text that accompanies the piece throughout. This text is a verbatim record of personal testimonies gathered through the artists' call out to the public to submit answers to questions about how they've experienced the climate changing and what it makes them feel. Some speak of the disappearance of moths and hedgehogs, others of unseasonal snow or floods, and one voice candidly says that they haven't experienced any change at all, but they believe the scientists who tell them that change, the crisis, is happening.

The setting is Khye-Rell, part of a web of worlds in our universe's distant future. In this society, history is forbidden. A young girl, Kes'Cha'Au’, crosses a series of ‘transdimensional canals’, journeying back through our own time and our looming ecological collapse. She reveals, at the heart of everything, the universe creating itself out of nothing: it inscribes itself like a rune.

In his introductory preamble, Frank Madlener claimed that audiences would experience and hear The World After Covid during the 2021 edition of IRCAM's annual festival. Luckily a late change in French law allowed me to review an eight-day slice of this monde l’apres in person. (Full disclosure: one of my own pieces was performed at the last concert of the festival as part of a workshop with composer Isabel Mundry.)