There are some composers whose music i keep coming back to not out of love but with the attitude of a nutcracker, trying once again to break through its tough, tenacious surface. i don’t know Milton Babbitt‘s music well (as i admitted when noting his centenary a few years back),…

Today’s featured work is one for the southern hemisphere, now entering its warmest months of the year. Composed in 1991, Lithuanian composer Onutė Narbutaitė‘s Vasara is a miniature choral homage to the season of summer. The words, written by the composer, have a nostalgic flavour, looking back at the experiences…

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is the first of two live, untitled performances given by Spanish sound artist Francisco López at Cafe Oto in London in March 2015. The performances were originally presented in four channels, with members of the audience invited to wear eye masks in order to plunge themselves…

For those of a Catholic persuasion, today is one of the days devoted to Mary in the liturgical calendar, so it’s as good a time as any to feature in my Advent Calendar a setting of Ave Maria by Estonian composer Tõnis Kaumann. A few years ago i explored Kaumann’s…

Though i don’t (any longer) have a religious bone in my body, i’m nonetheless drawn to the paintings of John Martin, particularly his vast, frenzied depictions of some of the more apocalyptic events described in the Bible. i find myself thinking of Martin’s paintings while listening to On the Face…

“Everything changes it is extraordinary how everything does change.” That short quotation from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography has provided Naomi Pinnock with two separate titles for two related works. Everything changes for viola and cello was composed in 2011 as the accompaniment to a short film by Pavla Scerankova titled…

In last year’s Advent Calendar i featured an untitled piece by Max de Wardener from a live performance at the Southbank Centre in March 2014. On the same occasion he presented a new version of Until my Blood is Pure, originally included on his 2002 EP Stops. That version, for…

Pierre Boulez composed his piano work Douze Notations in 1945. After its première in February of that year (by Yvette Grimaud), the piece was subsequently withdrawn by Boulez (evidently already regarding it as outdated), who only relented and allowed it to be published in the mid-1980s. Despite this, in 1946…

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is an example of what may well prove to be a substantial body of work that we might call ‘Covid music’, composed during the pandemic. Hold, by Northern Irish composer Elaine Agnew, is a short work for string orchestra responding to the experience of lockdown in…

Today marks the 60th birthday of Ukraine-born, Estonia-based composer Galina Grigorjeva. Her music over the last decade or so has progressively moved more closely in both character and ideology to that of Arvo Pärt, rooted in musical simplicity, articulating aspects of Orthodox religious belief. In the case of her 2005…

This year’s composer in residence at HCMF, Lisa Streich, was represented by an appropriately large number of performances, allowing for a pretty deep dive into her musical thinking. If i say that a lot of what i heard of Streich’s music was more intriguing than immediately enjoyable, i need to…

It’s 1 December, so it’s time to begin the second annual 5:4 Advent Calendar. During the next few weeks i’ll be briefly exploring a diverse selection of curiosities, oddities and wonderments. The majority will be short pieces, but i’ll also be featuring larger works occasionally.

People doing interesting things to objects doesn’t necessarily create interesting music. Can we agree on that? i don’t think that’s a particularly outrageous thing to say, though there were a number of times during my six days at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival when i found myself wondering otherwise.…

This afternoon i’m heading north for a few days to experience some of this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Words in abundance once i return next week.

In 2018, when exploring the music of Rebecca Saunders in that year’s Lent Series, i made the following remark regarding recordings of her music: The fact that i’ve explored Rebecca Saunders’ recorded output over four articles suggests that she’s well represented by recordings of her work. But almost half of…

Nearly 40 years have passed since Spanish sound artist Francisco López‘s earliest releases. Whatever else has changed throughout those four decades of creativity, one thing has remained consistent: his use of the word ‘Untitled’ for his output. Not always, of course, but aside from a few exceptions, López’s output has…

Twentieth century music is at an interesting point in its history from the perspective of recordings. Contemporary music, for obvious reasons, is always the most under-represented, whereas works from the last hundred years are beginning to reach the stage where’s there’s a more meaningful range of recordings available. In the…

Concerts of contemporary music have a tendency to be obsessed with presenting premières, yet it’s all too common for those performances to be dazzling one-offs that are all too soon lost to oblivion. So there’s some serious kudos due to NMC for saving two such performances, both electroacoustic, both showcasing…

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld…

The last time i wrote about Australian composer Brett Dean was exploring his response to the music of J. S. Bach, as part of The Brandenburg Project. This time it’s Beethoven’s music that Dean is responding to, in his orchestral work Testament, which has recently been released in a performance…