I have long been intrigued by the way James Saunders’ music is at home both in the more canonical new music contexts (such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Donaueschinger Musiktage or Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) and in more underground, fugitive contexts. This may be because – unlike so many composers who tip the scales to one side or another – Saunders is equally interested in relationships between sounds and relationships between people. The following text explores the ways Saunders’ work has balanced these interests; it originated in an interview initiated by Simon Reynell to accompany the CD release of Saunders’ composition assigned #15, performed by Apartment House, on Reynell's Another Timbre label. We subsequently followed up with a second interview extending the discussion to more recent work.

Jörg Widmann's work embraces everything music history – and beyond – has to offer: Lachenmann, Boulez, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rilke's Late Sonnets and the Screaming Pope paintings of Francis Bacon. His transformative re-imagining of traditional forms is seen nowhere better than in the Jagdquartett, the third in a cycle of five quartets that comprise the core of his œuvre. In the interview around which this article is based he discusses the Jagdquartett and its inspirations in detail, and the possibility of his music representing a kind of meta-modernism.

Michael Tippett's Fourth Symphony opens with the striking sound of an intake of breath, a gesture, which – according to the composer – describes the very nature of existence. Such statements are not uncommon from Tippett, yet nevertheless this is a broad claim, which naturally poses more questions than it answers. This article explores whether such a claim has any validity, presenting a philosophically led reading of the opening breath motif in an attempt to understand whether art can really shed new light on the well-rehearsed arguments of metaphysical enquiry.

Gottfried Michael Koenig (b. 1926) is a seminal figure in the history of electronic music. He contributed important technical and musical ideas at WDR studio in Cologne from 1954 to 1964. He was then the director of the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Netherlands until 1986. Since 1986, Koenig has continued to compose, to develop complex computer systems, and to edit, translate, and publish his extensive corpus of theoretical writings.1 This conversation, which aims to foster further English-language scholarship on Koenig and his music,2 took place in English in May 2015 at the Institute of Sonology, now located in The Hague, Netherlands.

In recent years there has been an increase in the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of scholarly and popular writing on the histories of electronic music in Britain. In this literature, the contributions of Peter Zinovieff (b. 1933) and his computer-equipped electronic music studio to those histories have been variously exaggerated, underestimated and misreported. This article attempts to correct this misinformation, investigating Zinovieff's solo work and his collaborations with Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze and others, through a critical discussion of two recent contributions to the discourse surrounding the compositions realised at Zinovieff's EMS studio in the 1960s and 70s.

Morgen und Abend is Georg Friedrich Haas's seventh opera, a co-commission by the Royal Opera in London and Deutsche Opera in Berlin. It is an hour-and-a-half long, and its libretto is adapted from the novel Morgon og Kveld (2000) by Norwegian author Jon Fosse, whose work Haas previously adapted in Melancholia for the Paris Opéra. Morgen und Abend's two continuous scenes present the life of fisherman Johannes by focusing on its two most salient moments – Johannes's birth (in the morning) and death (in the evening). In this strategy there is a slight, if inadvertent, echo of the lights on/lights off of Haas's In Vain.

Sideshow, for amplified octet and electronics by American composer Steven Takasugi, was given its US premiere by Talea Ensemble in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 1 December 2015. A 2010 Guggenheim Foundation grant launched Takasugi's work on this hour-long piece, and the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik programmed the first performance in their November 2015 festival. The piece was eagerly anticipated, not least because an excerpt of it featured in Manchester-based Distractfold Ensemble's programme at Darmstadt in 2014, a performance that earned them the Kranichsteiner performance prize that year.

National Sawdust opened in October 2015, and behind its brick facade in Brooklyn a promising venue for new music was unveiled, overseen by composers, creators and visionaries. Splotched in haphazard polygons and neon tubes, the modest space offers an intimate environment for a new generation of artists to showcase their work. The venue's name comes from the sawdust factory that once occupied the century-old building at 80 North 6th street, and which its governing non-profit organisation raised over $16 million to bring to life. The building was designed by Bureau V architects and the acoustic consultants from Arup, who made some critical decisions, such as placing the building on over 1,000 metal springs to absorb the shock from the subway trains running nearby. Advised by a board whose members include Philip Glass, Renée Fleming and Laurie Anderson, composer and entrepreneur Paola Prestini helms the organisation.

Kammer Klang is enjoying a purple patch. Based in East London's Café Oto, the series sits in a sweet spot between the rougher-edged music usually played at Oto and the more conventionally white cubed silence of new music. Audiences are generally relaxed in the setting, despite creaking chairs. The series' mixed programmes gel, with the distance between various featured musics growing ever smaller as cultural demographics continue to shift.

The 2015 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (or hcmf//, a vital acronym for Twitter users) began not with a bang, but with an anti-fanfare of dense pianissimo sliding microtones, buzzy with multiphonics. The scene was thus set (by Klangforum Wien performing Substantie by Peter Jakober) for an intense opening evening of three performances that between them encapsulated some of the musical themes, trends and ideas set to play out across the ten days and 30 events to come at Britain's leading contemporary music festival.

The opening weekend of hcmf// presented concerts representative of the widening sense of stylistic diversity that seems to underlie this year's curatorial strategy.

In keeping with now-established tradition, Monday was devoted to ‘hcmf// shorts’, a series of free, mostly bite-size concerts. The format is certainly appealing as a way to encounter a diverse range of musical worlds in one go, and it is valuable as a starting-point for those less familiar with new music; every event I attended was packed, and it was encouraging to see students, school groups and families among the attendees. Concerts in different venues were linked by Stephen Chase's participatory walking pieces, which transformed the journeys between them into enjoyable explorations of the changing acoustic environment (thanks to a route that took in tunnels, corridors, traffic and so on).

Roughly midway through this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a solo recital performance by the glissando flautist Erik Drescher somehow managed to capture simultaneously much of what makes today's hcmf// both interesting and infuriating. Drescher's choice of four pieces, obviously severely limited by the finite number of works scored for his unusual instrument, managed to forge divisions even through what seemed a somewhat partisan audience. Pairing the by-now somewhat familiar and perhaps predictable stylings of Salvatore Sciarrino's Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio with his fight to be heard over the wall of blasting electronic noise featured in Dror Feiler's Questions and Stones 3, and then again against the subtle simplicity of Alvin Lucier's Double Himalaya meant that most left in parts satisfied and in parts irritated.

This year's Transit festival (the sixteenth) marked an important milestone, as Maarten Beirens took over as Artistic Director from Mark Delaere, who has steered it through the last 15 years. Delaere very much devised the festival's format, with its hard-edged programming and quirky informality, which one feared might be lost, but any worries about drastic changes under the new regime were soon allayed. Indeed, Beirens is to be congratulated on pulling off one of the most successful festivals I can remember, with an almost unbroken series of strong, inventive works and performances.

An atmosphere of sadness, anger and uncertainty dominated this year's Donaueschinger Musiktage. The passing in November 2014 of Armin Köhler, the artistic driving force behind the festival for the last 23 years, has left a hole that will be hard to fill. Meanwhile, due to state budget cuts Donaueschingen's orchestra-in-residence, the SWR Sinfonieorchester Freiburg und Baden-Baden, paid what will almost certainly be their final visit. Musically, however, it was business as usual, with the programme featuring a wide variety of world premieres, several of works that will certainly be heard many times again, alongside much experimentation of varying interest and executional success.

Nordic Music Days claims to be the longest-running annual music festival in the world, having existed as a showcase for contemporary Nordic composers more-or-less continuously since 1888. This longevity raises some questions of category definition: What might unite today's composers working in Helsinki with their counterparts 1,500 miles away in Reykjavík? Has modern communications technology and international study wiped out national characteristics or amplified them? Does anyone working in this year's host city, Copenhagen, ever make the 30-minute journey over the bridge to check out what's going on in Malmö? What, if anything, does being a ‘Nordic composer’ mean?

In the closing sentence of an essay titled ‘Music and New Music’, from 1960, Theodor Adorno claimed, with his characteristic lack of equivocation, that the difference between new music and music in general was akin to the difference between good music and bad music. His rather sweeping claim was mitigated somewhat by his definition of ‘new music’, which was highly restricted in terms of its technical and moral imperatives. With respect to technique and style, ‘new music’ for Adorno meant almost exclusively the freely atonal music of Schoenberg and his students. Morally speaking, ‘new music’ was defined as that which embodied a critical resistance to the existing order and preserved the freedom of subjective expression as demanded by a Hegelian view of history.