There are times when it can feel like all contemporary music is split down the middle, with half the composers concerned with frantic activity and movement, and the other half obsessed with the opposite, stillness and immobility. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s more than a little truth to it, and …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a quick bit of fun from British composer Sasha Scott. In 2019, Scott won the Senior category in the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition with a four-minute orchestral-electronic hybrid titled Humans May Not Apply. It’s a work that both pits the acoustic …

Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the shortest works i’ve ever written about. Circumdederunt… in memoriam Rita Wagner by György Kurtág commemorates the Hungarian pianist who died in 2021. Back in 2019, my esteemed blogospherical colleague David Nice mentioned that, after attending a masterclass with Wagner, he had “probably …

One of the most incredible – and entirely unexpected – performances i’ve heard this year took place in Tartu University Museum in April, at a recital given by Estonian duo Anna-Liisa Eller and Taavi Kerikmäe. These two, in their combinations of kannel, keyboard instruments and electronics, exploring both contemporary and …

One of the more memorable pieces to have been featured in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s annual ‘Shorts’ day (comprising a conveyor belt of miniature concerts, all free to the public) in recent years is Borneo Rivers 2 by Larry Goves. In many ways it’s an unassuming piece: just six …

Nestling behind today’s Advent Calendar door is one of the most remarkable choral works i’ve ever heard, and one that nicely continues the “I am” reflections from yesterday. I Am Calling to You by Maria Kõrvits is a piece for male choir setting a text that, while some attribute to …

When words emerge in Naomi Pinnock‘s music, that’s precisely what they do: emerge. This is achieved partly by paring down the text to a bare essential minimum (The writings of Jakob Br. uses just two words, for example), but more due to the manner in which the words are articulated. …

The piece lurking behind today’s Advent Calendar door is something of an amuse-bouche by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, titled ein kleines symphonisches Gedicht [a little symphonic poem]. Composed in 2017, its 7-minute duration is occupied with one of Haas’ typically focused behavioural-timbral explorations, looking at the way both transformation …

i’ve heard many wonderful things during my numerous trips to Estonia during the last decade, but today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of the most memorable of them all. That may seem strange considering it’s done and dusted in under four minutes, but its brevity is one of the prime …

British composer Michael Finnissy has so often turned to extant music in his own compositions that it’s practically one of the defining features of his work. Today’s Advent Calendar piece is one of his most blissful responses to earlier music, rethinking material by Byrd and Ockeghem as Two Motets for …

In my 2022 Advent Calendar, i included Milton Babbitt‘s An Encore, a work i likened to a nut that i kept returning to in order to try new ways to crack it. It’s a similar situation with the work of his i’m featuring today, Autobiography of the Eye for soprano …

6 December is Finland’s Independence Day, so today’s Advent Calendar piece is by Finnish composer Lauri Supponen. Continuo (which i briefly discussed earlier this year) is a short ensemble work, composed in 2021, that’s rooted in much earlier music, Frescobaldi’s Recercar con obligo di cantare la quinta parte senza toccarla. …

One of contemporary music’s most stunningly, and consistently, original voices is Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė. Her works, which she describes as ‘monochrome’, each restrict themselves to one basic timbre, which becomes the basis for the entire unfolding narrative. In the case of Apnea, composed in 2021, the sound of strings …

In due course, when her music has finally been disseminated and explored properly, and begun to be understood, i’m convinced Gloria Coates will be revealed not only as one of the most fascinating and unique musical voices of modern times, but also as one its most prolific recyclers. In the …

i’m turning today to an enigmatic piece by Giacinto Scelsi, one of the last he ever composed. Maknongan dates from 1976, just a year before Scelsi would cease composing altogether. At this time, his attention had become focused on low sounds. Dharana, composed the previous year, is for cello and …

It might seem a bit seasonally early, but the title of today’s Advent Calendar piece is, i suspect, to be taken figuratively. A Forest Reawakens by Electra Perivolaris is a short but potent orchestral work that articulates what one could read as the beginnings of a process of rebirth or …

It’s 1 December, and the festive season is distantly hoving into view, the perfect time for another 5:4 Advent Calendar, featuring 25 days of sonic wonders, curiosities, trifles and delights. The first of these baubles is Dance from a Distance, a miniature orchestral bit of fun from one of my …

At the more serious end of the expressive spectrum, there was a lot to take in during my long weekend at this year’s HCMF. It was disappointing to witness, in Ann Cleare‘s TERRARIUM, yet another example of that which has become so prevalent at HCMF in recent years, a multimedia …

Despite the fact that in recent years my general feeling about the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is that it’s become over-familiar and rather predictable – perhaps in need of a fresh start / reboot – my experience during the opening weekend of this year’s HCMF was genuinely unexpected: music that …

As i mentioned previously, the majority of this year’s AFEKT was focused on solo performers – primarily members of Ensemble Musikfabrik – with or without electronics, and these proved to be the strongest events of the festival.