For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik was stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For 25 years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than ‘the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde's chief fortress’. The focus was shifting to Paris, where, in 1977, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Led by Pierre Boulez and staffed by Luciano Berio, Vinko Globokar, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, its stated mission was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench) were also redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. And in America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his ‘unanswered question’ to the American public, on television, in 1976. And uptown and downtown were ensconced, with Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman appointed to the faculties at the Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a new and disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to the Second World War.

In 1986 I made six programmes about The Mysterious Art of the Conductor for the BBC's World Service. These derived from Interviews with nine conductors, among them Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Charles Mackerras. Each programme lasted half-an-hour and included music examples. The interviews were much longer, but each was filleted and spliced so as to juxtapose – and sometimes contrast – the views of different conductors on particular aspects of their art. The interview with Pierre Boulez, reproduced here in full, was recorded in Broadcasting House on 25 October 1986. It gave me special pleasure and is, I believe, of special interest.

As we celebrate his centennial year, perhaps it is now reasonable to speak of Elliott Carter's ‘late music’, but I doubt it. The Double Concerto – written more than 45 years ago – was once described as the culmination of Carter's mature style. And who could have predicted that the Concerto for Orchestra – completed in 1969, when Carter was sixty – would eventually join his Depression-era ballet Pocahontas in the first quarter of his total output. Every piece that once seemed to be the capstone of Carter's illustrious career has turned out instead to be a milestone that marks the beginning of another new path. Since he completed his first opera What Next? ten years ago, Carter has composed more than three dozen new pieces, comprising nearly a third of his life's work to date, all of it composed since his 90th birthday!

Since music is a ‘time art’, it follows that questions of form cannot be entirely detached from considerations of time; indeed some composers would argue that they cannot be detached from it at all. The issues involved … partly stray into areas of philosophy. (Toop 2005: 166)

Imagine fundamental durations beyond boundaries of musical time. (Stockhausen 1959: 26)

In music's huge jungle somebody, once, wanted to build a road: a road you can walk on and one which leads somewhere. Such a road is Bartók's Mikrokosmos. A conceptual work, not a mere succession of pieces: each of them is part of a total vision based on similar elements and unfolding according to similar principles. If you are even a little familiar with them, you will recognize their flavor even if you turn on the radio in the middle of a piece.

Music's ability to animate a range of expressive nuances between the tangible and the intangible, and to play many different roles in spiritual life, are but two reasons why artists with mystical inclinations often choose it over other media. The composer George Tsontakis (born 1951 in Astoria, New York, of Cretan origins) writes music that frequently explores mystical themes both directly and more obliquely. The goal of this – the first major journal article on his work – is to touch upon important attributes of that language and its development by comparing two recent works, both of which have been released in première recordings in the last year. Violin Concerto No. 2 (2003) and Man of Sorrows (2005), written within a two-year period, both belong to the concerto genre. (Although it does not bear the word ‘concerto’ in its title, Man of Sorrows is a large-scale work for piano soloist and orchestra). Despite their remarkable differences, both works represent a recent ‘crystallization’ of Tsontakis's musical language, as shown in the outstanding impact that they have made in the international sphere, and in their ability to appeal to both cognoscenti and lay people alike.

I met with James MacMillan to discuss his cantata Seven Last Words from the Cross (1993). The conversation, which took place at MacMillan's home in Glasgow on 30 November 2007, ranged far beyond that particular piece and lasted for over 90 minutes. Whilst the conversation has been edited to remove repetitions, I have endeavoured to represent MacMillan's comments accurately.

The composer Robert Simpson was a pupil of Herbert Howells, studying with him for the D.Mus which he took at Durham University in 1951. This was the time of the St Pauls' Service, when Howells was nearly 60 and Simpson just 30. Simpson took no composition lessons with Howells, but had tuition from him in counterpoint. Simpson told me that one day he had written a fugue on a subject of his own devising, and he took it along to Howells with not a little pride in his achievement. Howells looked at the fugue, said nothing, and then took out a fountain pen and, as Simpson put it

wrote a complete fugue there and then, in his beautifully fastidious hand, as fluently and easily as if he was writing a letter, exploring all the intervals and implications of my subject in a way that I had not thought possible.

It was at an interview towards the end of my research project in January 2005 that Henri Dutilleux, one of the most unique composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, granted me an exclusive opportunity to discuss aspects of his musical training. In the interview he reflects on his studies in the provinces and at the Paris Conservatoire:

I did not study piano at the Conservatoire, nor did I study organ. I received my technique in the provinces. The Director of Douai tutored me well, which is why I was at a very good level when I entered the Conservatoire [Paris]. With my solid training, I was encouraged to enter the Prix de Rome very soon, which is why I did not study there long enough.

The project of introducing an unknown repertory into discourses on music can be approached in a range of ways. The writer can make a case about its regrettable neglect and its unjustified exclusion from a historical canon, or can argue for its (political) relevance to the present. Or s/he can simply try to persuade readers of its aesthetic qualities: this third desire might well drive the first two, however covertly. The path I take here is unabashedly more ambitious. In attempting to open the hearts and minds of the uninitiated reader to a composer little-known outside Switzerland and Hungary, I will suggest that he offers us a significantly new way of thinking about music history in the 20th century as a whole.

Captured by the 16th-century Indian poetess Mirabai and her works (transcribed by Robert Bly), John Harbison was especially intrigued with the manner in which she combined religion with ritual and eroticism. He has stated:

Her answers involved the ecstatic, the devotional and the artistic, but her independence and resolve and her dancer's vitality led my setting toward narrative and characterization, unusual territory for a song cycle.

In the realm of art music, Leo Brouwer (1939-) is widely considered as the most significant living composer for the guitar. Since the latter part of the 20th century, students of the guitar at most, if not all, recognized music institutions have increasingly sought to perform Brouwer's works. Correspondingly, at the South African College of Music (University of Cape Town) respected instructors like Elspeth Jack, Neefa van der Schyff, and others, have over many years consistently and devotedly incorporated Brouwer's guitar literature into their teaching programmes. Cape Town's prized composer-conductor Alan Stephenson has similarly developed a keen interest in Brouwer's large-scale works, inspiring in 1998 a memorable rendition of Brouwer's acclaimed Elegiaco Concerto, performed by the talented soloist Christiaan Van der Vyver and the University of Cape Town Orchestra. In line with this, one of Brouwer's underlying goals has been to create works that are accessible to players of varying standards of performance. As a consequence, young, inexperienced, moderate, advanced as well as top internationally-acclaimed virtuosic players have all found some measure of contentment in performing Brouwer's guitar works.

The 400 block of South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, is rich in musical associations. On the southern corner stands the Auditorium Building, the 1889 masterpiece of Sullivan and Adler. Inside its huge theatre were born both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Civic Opera. For this gilded space with its unusual acoustics, Prokofiev in 1919 composed The Love for Three Oranges.

• London, Royal Albert Hall Proms 2007 Robert Stein, Rodney Lister, Malcolm Miller, Martin Anderson

• Tallinn: Estonian Music Days Benjamin Broening

• Gloucester: Three Choirs Festival Roderic Dunnett

• Cheltenham Festival 2007: MacMillan and Payne Paul Conway

• Cardiff, Welsh National Opera: ‘The Sacrifice’ Roderic Dunnett

• London, Almeida Theatre: Streetwise Opera Jill Barlow

• Pretoria: Stefans Grové Annemie Stimie

• Mendham, Suffolk: A Pastoral Revelation John Wheatley

• Brussels, La Monnaie: Henze's ‘Phaedra’ Roderic Dunnett

• St. Albans, Maltings Arts Centre: Stephen Dodgson's ‘Nancy the Waterman’ Jill Barlow

• Further Reports Rodney Lister, Raymond Head

• Boston: Elliott Carter's Horn Concerto Rodney Lister

• London, Barbican: Sophia Gubaidulina's second violin concerto In tempus praesansJohn Wheatley

• London, St Giles, Cripplegate: Pavel Novák David Matthews

• London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Simon Holt's ‘Sueňos’ John Wheatley

• London, Warehouse: Sarah Nicolls and ‘Hyper Piano’ Jill Barlow

• London, Wigmore Hall: Alexander Goehr 75th Birthday Concert Malcolm Miller

• London, Barbican: Colin Matthews's ‘Reflected Images’ John Wheatley

• London, Royal Festival Hall: Korngold's ‘Das Wunder der Heliane’ Martin Anderson

• London, Spitalfields Festival: Barley, Metcalfe and Barrett Jill Barlow

• London, Sadler's Wells: A Maconchy Operatic double-bill Guy Rickards

• London, Globe Theatre 2007 Season: ‘Renaissance and Revolution’ Jill Barlow

• Reports from California Jeff Dunn, Malcolm Miller

The really important question is: ‘What does the composer start with; where does he begin?’ The answer to that is, Every composer begins with a musical idea – a musical idea, you understand, not a mental, literary, or extramusical idea. Suddenly a theme comes to him. (Theme is used as synonymous with musical idea.) The composer starts with this theme; and the theme is a gift from Heaven. Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music (1939)

• Malcolm Williamson's Mischievous Muse Paul Conway

• Alex Ross's ‘The Rest is Noise’ Rodney Lister

• Covent Garden: Birtwistle ‘Minotaur’ Arnold Whittall

• London, Barbican: MacMillan's ‘St John Passion’ Robert Stein

• Tallinn: Estonian Music Days Peter Reynolds

• Huddersfield: John Pickard's ‘Agamemnon's Tomb’ Paul Conway

• Tel Aviv: Yoram Meyouhas's Viola Concerto Malcolm Miller

• London, Cadogan Hall: Music in Exile Roderic Dunnett

• Oxford: Raymond Head and Clement Jewitt Lionel Sainsbury

• Further reports from St Albans, Sussex, Andover and London Jill Barlow, John Wheatley, Roderic Dunnett

• Messiaen's ‘Oiseaux Exotiques’ Christopher Dingle

• Hungarian Music Tim Rutherford-Johnson

• Theology in Cage and Stockhausen Clemens Gresser

• Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham Rodney Lister

• Arthur Wills Memoir Bret Johnson

• Glasgow: Ronald Stevenson's ‘Praise of Ben Dorain’ Tim Mottershead

• Glasgow & Edinburgh: Scottish Opera's ‘Five: 15’ David Johnson

• Boston: William Bolcom's Eighth Symphony Rodney Lister

• London, Barbican: BBC SO premières Martin Anderson

• London, Barbican: Judith Weir Weekend Paul Conway

• London, South Bank Centre: Contemporary Music and Spirituality John Wheatley

• Manchester: John McCabe's Cello Concerto Tim Mottershead

• Liverpool, Metropolitan Cathedral: Tavener's ‘Requiem’ Paul Conway

• Further reviews John Wheatley and Tim Mottershead