Childhood play, leadership, suspense, thoughts of mediation and conciliation, Hamlet-like reflections on being and not-being, facing and conquering fears, and a hunger for stability and security in personal relationships, together with a full panoply of riffs on the colour yellow in European popular culture – many of them frankly unpleasant – are among the challenging ingredients of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus LICHT, the last segment of the seven-opera LICHT jigsaw to be put in place. Stockhausen's operas are intricate literary puzzles or charades, every detail of which can be assigned a number of coded meanings. Despite bravura performances by an exceptional team of musicians, Graham Vick skated over much of the composer's uneasy symbolism in a brusque and simplistic arte povera production which, along with a battery of unsolved sound projection issues inherent in the score, placed altogether too much emphasis on the composer's dark side.

Beethoven's famous letter to ‘The Immortal Beloved’ still remains a central reference point for our image of his life and music. Gerald Barry's 2007 composition for bass voice and ensemble – simply entitled Beethoven – sets this text in its entirety, continuing an engagement with Beethoven's own words and presenting a striking juxtaposition of language and music. This article explores the ways in which Barry at times underpins and in other places undercuts the apparent meaning of the words, and how he presents a reading of the letter that is clearly alive to its inherent self-contradictions. Characteristically, Barry brings together a number of highly expressive and strongly contrasted musical characters in this work; an examination of aspects of his compositional language illustrates how material is propagated and form articulated, and explores the way in which these techniques interact in the creation of an expressive and emotionally charged whole.

In his writings on music Hans Keller includes Skalkottas among the few great twentieth-century composers of ‘symphonic thought’, and considers him to be the only ‘symphonic genius’ after Schoenberg whose ‘genius’ remains to be discovered. Although during the time of his writings, Keller was in a minority in his appreciation of this relatively minor composer in the Western art music canon, he did not analyse any of Skalkottas's music in support of his views, as he did with the works of other composers who, although important to him, are not elevated to such a high plane. This paper first gives an overview of Keller's approach to and understanding of symphonic thought, as presented in his various writings and exemplified in his analyses of Schoenberg's music. Subsequently, it examines certain of Skalkottas's 12-note works and the compositional techniques he applies to construct them, which exhibit these characteristics of symphonic thought defined by Keller, and which might be used to substantiate his unexplained but intuitively correct assertions.

The word ‘Darmstadt’ has come to stand for a broad set of discursive tropes: whether positive or negative, the word is often used as a convenient shorthand for organising ways of thinking about music in the post-war era. I suggest that, after the many symbolic deaths of the avant-garde, the word Darmstadt has come to function, too, as a sort of Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, an idea which need have little to do with the father ‘proper’: rather it is a structuring principle, one which authorises and delimits the boundaries of the known, the prescribed and proscribed world. I argue, too, that the death of that symbolic father, however it becomes extended and perpetuated, surely presages rupture and collapse within the symbolic order. From this position, I examine the ways in which various spectres of Darmstadt – borrowing from Derrida's Marxian hauntologie – return, both within the world of New Music and beyond.

The 2012 Cultural Olympiad contained plenty of events that might have happened quite normally without the 2012 badge. The Olympics themselves may even have contributed to a 40% drop in museum attendance over the summer, as recently reported in some newspapers. But Birmingham Opera Company's production, starting on 22 August, of Mittwoch, the ‘unstageable’ third part of Stockhausen's Licht, at the Argyle Works in Great Barr Street was a Mo Farah moment. Not only for the Olympian commitment and talent required, but also because without Olympian funding (something in the order of £1 million was rumoured) it simply would not have been possible. Director Graham Vick had co-opted the varied talents of Ex Cathedra, London Voices, Paul Brown as designer, Giuseppe di Iorio in charge of lighting, Ron Howell as choreographer, and Kathinka Pasveer as musical director.

On 1 September, ten days after the premiere in Birmingham of the ‘Wednesday’ segment of Stockhausen's Licht cycle, a vocal sextet written in tandem with the final scene received an airing at a matinée concert in Lucerne's Matthäuskirche. Composed, like the rest of Mittwoch, in 1997, Menschen, hört (‘Listen, people’) obviously carried special significance for the composer. The a cappella piece can be performed independently of the cycle, and Stockhausen's text is inscribed on the gravestone he designed for himself ten years before his death.

Was it a reflection of the current economic squeeze or a deliberate retreat from the ways of Gargantua following the bold programming of Havergal Brian's mighty Gothic Symphony in 2011? Whatever the reason, brevity seemed to be the keynote of a good deal of new music featured in the 118th Proms season. In fact, few commissions and premières, including the majority of those considered below, lasted much longer than ten minutes.

Postmodernism in music may be hard to define – even harder than the same notoriously slippery term in literature – but Olga Neuwirth's viola concerto Remnants of songs … an Amphigory (2009) may be as good an exemplar as any. Given its UK première on 13 August by the talented British violist Lawrence Power, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Susanna Mälkki, the concerto's Proms appearance marks the first time the festival has put on any of her pieces.

On 21 August the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons, gave the first UK Performance of Emily Howard's Calculus of the Nervous System. The work is the concluding panel of a triptych (the earlier ones are called Ada sketches and Mesmerism), which is a tribute to Ada Lovelace (1815–52), the daughter of Lord Byron who, as a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer. The title is that of the mathematical model that Lovelace hoped to develop to demonstrate how, as Howard writes, ‘the brain gives way to thought, and nerves to feeling’. Howard conceived Calculus of the Nervous System as a series of ‘memories’, whose structure is ‘a neural network with its roots in strictly engineered time … using values from one source (an exponential equation and its derivative), subsequently muddled and reordered by chance processes’. The memories are linked in some way that is not clear and not explained by the quotations from Sir Geoffrey Hills's Clavics which appear in the score (but which are not in any way audible or able to be apprehended by anyone without a score).

Way back in the mists of time, in the decade when I was a card-carrying Prommer (1977–87), the BBC used to arrange (and maybe still does) a meeting between us regular Prommers and the Controller, Music – the man whose choices governed two months of our lives every year. Robert Ponsonby was the incumbent when I first had a season ticket and John Drummond was at the helm when I left London for a job in Paris. We never had the impression that anything we said made a blind bit of difference, but at least it allowed us to get things off our chests; all the Controller had to do was fend off our questions and comments with the oiliness then customary with the high functionaries of the BBC (they're all wonderful now, of course) and our silence was obtained for another year. (I remember Drummond contemptuously dismissing the music of Respighi as being beneath the dignity of the institution; Roger Wright, I gratefully note, does not share Drummond's snobbish ignorance, but I also note that neither the Concerto gregoriano for violin and orchestra nor Metamorphosen, both orchestral masterpieces, has yet been heard there.)

Meurig Bowen, now in his fifth year as Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival, continues to reinforce this illustrious annual event's reputation for programming new works by major composers. His scheduling of the majority of the 2012 festival's premières on the second day – 5 July – was exceptionally convenient for aficionados of contemporary music in general and served to reduce markedly this reviewer's carbon footprint.

Between April and June 2012, pianist Noriko Ogawa presented four recitals titled Reflections on Debussy, in the Mirror of the East, which presented his major piano works, with compositions by Japanese composers Takemitsu, Yoshimatsu, and two commissions from Yoshihiro Kanno (b.1953). The first of the Kanno works presented, on 25 May, was Sky Maze (2011) for piano and organ (featuring Jonathan Scott), oddly placed in a concert otherwise devoted to two-piano repertoire (with Martin Roscoe). The programme note revealed the work was originally to have been premièred in August 2011 at the MUZA Kawasaki concert hall – which was badly damaged by the earthquake and tsunami of the previous March – but offered no clue as to the work's intriguing title.

For six lively and exhilarating days at the end of August 2012, the Presteigne Festival's thirtieth anniversary was celebrated in 16 concerts featuring no fewer than nine new specially commissioned pieces, most of them from composers already closely associated with this much-anticipated annual event held in and around a modest borders town in Powys. Composer-in-residence Sally Beamish was well represented with a generous selection from her output for instrumental and chamber forces, including the premières of two new arrangements of her earlier works. Each concert was programmed with exemplary care by Artistic Director George Vass, resulting in a rich assortment of contemporary and rarely encountered twentieth-century music together with mainstream repertoire.

Samuel Beckett, famed for his strikingly negative approach in his stage play Waiting for Godot (1953), also has a string of prose and poetry in similar vein to his credit over the years. So it was that Spitalfields Festival came to commission Alec Roth to write music to accompany a performance of Beckett's ‘Old Earth’ from his prose work Fizzles written 1972–75. This received its world première at Spitalfields Summer Festival 2012, suitably housed in the stark dark space of The Village Underground, a disused warehouse resembling an abandoned railway tunnel in London's East End. Trying to find my seat in the dark, when I attended the first night, 15 June 2012, shadowy figures were already chanting what turned out to be verses from James Joyce's Ulysses as a fittingly mysterious, if unheralded, informal prologue. This was followed by drama directed by Jonathan Holmes, founder of Jericho House, with music by The Sixteen under their founder-conductor Harry Christophers.

Although John McCabe's Rainforest II, of 1987, is in effect a chamber concerto for trumpet and 11 strings, his extensive body of concertante works has lacked an official trumpet concerto. La Primavera, which had its première on 15 June 2012, now happily fills that gap. The subtitle derives from McCabe's consideration of two aspects of the approach of Spring: the vitality of burgeoning growth and the flowering of the new or refreshed life as it expands.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Season 2012, entitled ‘The Play's The Thing’, centred on Henry V and Richard III, with new music scores by Claire van Kampen, and The Taming of the Shrew, with a new score by Richard Hammarton. In addition – and well timed in the year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and also the London Olympics – the Globe Theatre celebrated by sending out a worldwide invitation asking who would like to participate in their ‘Globe to Globe Festival’. As a result, 37 countries performed Shakespeare in 37 different languages here during the Season, within the architecture for which Shakespeare wrote, bringing with them a vast array of cultural diversity in music and dance dovetailed into the drama.