Despite the characteristic scepticism that British audiences reserve for musicians who cultivate more than one discipline, Vinko Globokar can be considered a phenomenon. Yet reasons can be adduced for his remarkable versatility. His jazz background has proved invaluable in his collaborations with exponents of free jazz and other improvising collectives. Improvisation has also been used as an educational tool. His close ties with Austro-German, French and Italian composition have given him significant insights into their historical development. Finally, his Slavonic origins have given him a unique view of the Western tradition, while heightening his awareness of various cultural, political and social problems, notably exile and alienation.

The music, like its composer, plays a game of hide and seek. But it does so in broad daylight. Robin Holloway's music is not always quoting others – although it quotes more, and more covertly, than many of his own published statements might lead one to believe – but quotation has become such a compulsive game for Holloway that it is often hard to say where ‘he’ stops or where ‘others’ begin. Whereas the composer's own public confessions have tended to focus on the extent to which his music adopts the voices and personas of others, it seems to the current writer that Holloway's own voice – its harmonic and textural mannerisms, preferences in structure and in subject matter, ways of relating notes to ideas and images – remains characteristic and recognizable throughout. It is the implications of this fact that I wish to explore in this brief survey.

There is an uncanny symmetry in the life of the French–Canadian composer Claude Vivier: we do not know the exact time or circumstances of his birth, and we do not know the exact time or circumstances of his death. The first of these two facts haunted Vivier all his life. Born to unknown parents in Montreal in April 1948 and placed in an orphanage, he became obsessed with the identity of his birth mother, whom he never knew. Several of his compositions can be heard as a poignant attempt to communicate with her. The second fact – his murder in March 1983 by a young Parisian criminal in circumstances that remain not fully investigated – has, you might say, haunted the posthumous reputation of his music. It seems impossible to discuss Vivier's work without mentioning the cruel and sordid circumstances of his death. For some, his murder is the key to an understanding of his life and – even more controversially – of his work.

The prevailing image of Messiaen in the 1930s is of an organist-composer. One of the first things learnt about him is that he was organist at the church of the Trinité in Paris, having been appointed at the spectacularly young age of 22. As the earliest (though not the first) of Messiaen's works to have been published, the short organ piece Le Banquet céleste (1928) is, quite rightly, the focus of close examination for its precocious assurance. The 1930s were punctuated by the substantial organ cycles La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) and Les Corps glorieux (1939), so it is no surprise to find Felix Aprahamian's article for the fifth edition of Grove describing Messiaen as being a ‘French organist and composer”, and later observing that ‘although it was as a composer of organ music that in pre-war years Messiaen's name first attracted attention, he had already composed a quantity of vocal music’. Fifty years later, Paul Griffiths similarly observed that ‘Organ works featured prominently in his output of the next decade [1930s], but so did music about his family’. According to Harry Halbreich, ‘one can say that before 1940, Messiaen was essentially an organist-composer’, while, Malcolm Hayes concludes his chapter on the early orchestral music in The Messiaen Companion by stating that ‘to judge from the idiom of his works written in the 1930s, he had once seemed destined to spend his creative life within the narrow confines of the organ loft’.

There is a widespread perception that music and architecture are profoundly dissimilar, far removed from each other in the creative spectrum. While music is regarded as ephemeral, transient, involving vibration, pitch and time – you hear it, you feel it, its beauty is assigned to your memory – the general response to architecture is fundamentally different. Those homogeneous, concrete volumes and solid, three-dimensional forms are thought to occupy a permanent, static and unyielding part of our environment, a constant reminder of its unique presence in time, unrelated to any other art-form. Architecture just does not float away into space like music – as some might fervently wish! But music and architecture cannot possibly exist independently in hermetically sealed compartments – they are inexorably bonded together by their very nature and by the cultural history that surrounds them.

South African composer Stefans Grové celebrates his eighty-fifth birthday this year. Grové studied under Erik Chisholm in Cape Town, took his Master's at Harvard under Walter Piston and attended Aaron Copland's composition class at the Tanglewood Summer School. He taught for over a decade at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore before returning to South Africa in 1972. He is Composer in Residence at the University of Pretoria.

The following interview between Percy Grainger and Daniel Sternberg was broadcast live over radio on 15 May 1946. Richard Morse, then conductor of the Baylor Golden Wave Band, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, captured the interview onto a 16-inch, 33 1/3; rpm acetate transcription record. The original recording is currently owned by Mrs. Richard Morse, the widow of Richard Morse.

The existence of this recording was brought to my attention by my dear friend Paul Concilio, a relative of Mrs. Morse. Because the original recording is in poor condition, Mr. Concilio transferred the recording to a compact disc using software to filter noise. This improved the recording greatly; however, portions of the interview are still indistinct. I am grateful to Mrs. Richard Morse and Mr. Concilio for their support and invaluable assistance in this project.

James Tenney, who has been called ‘America's most famous unknown composer’, exerted a lasting influence not only in the artistic fields of music, painting, theatre, and film, but also in the scientific realms of psychology, electroacoustics, and computer technology. The fact that Tenney's active presence can be charted across several areas of study reflects his own multifarious interests and provides an opportunity to examine how individuals in different disciplines reciprocally affected the composer.

Did Luigi Nono succeed in creating the ‘new music theatre’ that he wished to create – and does his second theatrical work Al gran sole carico d'amore (1975) represent such a theatre? The theatre was certainly a constant siren beckoning the composer. Right from the start of his creative life, Nono's primary concern as a composer had been with musical expression, and he cast the most powerful and often provocative literary texts in musical terms, as can be seen in the settings he made of Lorca poems during the early 1950s.

Last September Dr Arthur Wills OBE celebrated his 80th birthday by publishing his memoirs Full With Wills and enjoying a host of performances of some of his works. Now living in retirement in Ely, within sight of the great Cathedral whose musical life he developed and directed for over 40 years, he spoke to me at length in May this year about his life in music: as organist, choir director, composer, academic and educator.

Among the passengers on the ocean liner Provence, as it disembarked from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires on 30 July 1954 at the outset of its 18-day voyage to Marseilles, were members of the theatre company Renaud-Barrault, returning home after a lengthy tour during the course of which it had performed in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. If there was general fatigue at the end of such a gruelling schedule, during which the Company had given over 80 performances, there must have been an accompanying sense of exhilaration, and for perhaps the first time since leaving France on 24 April, an opportunity to relax. (Even the outward journey on Bretagne, the sister ship of Provence, had been taken up with a full schedule of rehearsals for the coming tour.) The joint directors, Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud, as well as the young musical director, Pierre Boulez, joined their colleagues on board Provence a few days later at the Brazilian port of Salvador de Bahia, having opted to return to Brazil for a few days, during which there was an opportunity to witness a candomblé ceremony. For Jean-Louis Barrault, it was evidently a joyous return to the country which was the scene of the Company's first and perhaps greatest triumphs on a tour which had been as successful in every respect as the Company's first visit to South America in 1950.

The folk view of composition is often that of an isolated, possibly unhinged genius, struggling alone at the piano or desk. However, in this article we will investigate the collaborative aspects of compositional life, showing how such an individualistic model of the composer is both accurate and inaccurate, and how this paradox is played out in current attempts to valorize collaborative work in composition. Although we intend some of the observations and conclusions from this article to generalize, we are fully aware that such a case-study can only really be illustrative and provocative. Given that this is the case we will finish by attempting to make some general points about the aesthetic and social contradictions which this study has brought to light. Our concern in this article is more prospective than retrospective: although we will refer to some historical data, we aim to reflect mainly on contemporary compositional practice in the West, and particularly the UK.

When the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–1995) celebrated his 80th birthday in 1990, a discordant note was sounded by Antje Müller in the main Swiss musicological journal Dissonanz. Sutermeister had enjoyed his first major successes in Nazi Germany, and Müller now subjected this fact to more intensive scrutiny than had anyone before her, questioning how ‘neutral’ a creative artist can be in his dealings with a totalitarian state.

• Reports from California: Holloway, Rouse, Adams Jeff Dunn

• Brussels: ‘Spring Awakening’ Roderic Dunnett

• London, Barbican: Gubaidulina Robert Stein

• London, Barbican: Bainbridge John Wheatley

• London, Barbican: Adès's ‘Tevot’ Robert Stein

• London: Nyman's ‘Handshake in the Dark’ Malcolm Miller

• London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Sheriff and McCabe Martin Anderson

• Basle: Richard Barrett's ‘Opening of the Mouth’ John Fallas

One of the most striking features in the music of the British composer Michael Nyman (born 1944) is the emphatic presence of musical quotations. This may be all the more remarkable because the main influence on Nyman's compositional style is minimal music. Generally, American minimal music is characterized by a large degree of abstraction, focussing on absolute music, clear abstract structures and the gradual unfolding of systematic musical processes. The almost provocatively objective appearance of the titles of works by Steve Reich (Violin Phase, Four Organs, Music for 18 Musicians) may be seen as emblematic for a music in which the transparent, process-like transformation of limited musical material calls for an equally objective type of material. Although American minimalists such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass take recourse to diatonic material and tonal or modal harmonies, any reference to specific historical models is almost unconceivable in their early work, as the associations that come with the quoted material would only distract the listener from the systematic processes that the material is being subjected to, which forms the essence of this style. In that respect, Michael Nyman's fusion of minimalist strictness with openly acknowledged borrowings of pre-existing music sets him apart from his American contemporaries. This article investigates how Nyman applies different aspects of his quotation technique, how he incorporates the musical and extra-musical characteristics and associations that come with the quoted material into a solid musical statement, and how all this is combined with the strictness of his minimalism-related composition technique.

The year 1930 marked the end of a brief artistic collaboration between the composer Paul Hindemith and the playwright Bertolt Brecht. This collaboration, which began in 1929, brought forth the 1929 Lehrstück and Der Lindberghflug, the latter also involving the contributions of Kurt Weill. However, this artistic relationship, which from its outset was on borrowed time, quickly deteriorated as the result of a heated disagreement regarding the 1930 Schott score of Lehrstück. In the score's preface Hindemith stressed the adaptability of the work according to the circumstances of the performers. The confrontational Brecht felt offended for what he perceived to be the subordination of his text to purely musical aims. Further, Brecht and Hindemith quarrelled on the goal underlying the didactic Lehrstück. Hindemith approached the work as a means to propagate his ideas regarding a modern audience (Laienmusik – or ‘music for the laymen’) and the new musical conventions of a Gebrauchsmusik (a complex concept developed later in the discourse).

London, Royal Albert Hall: Proms 2006 Martin Anderson, Robert Stein, Rodney Lister, Malcolm Miller

Belgrade: Jon Gibson's ‘Violet Fire’ Donata Premeru

London, St Pancras Church: Francis Pott Jill Barlow

Cheltenham Festival 2006 Paul Conway

Edinburgh: Stuart MacRae's ‘The Assassin Tree’ David Johnson

Lucerne Festival: Heinz Holliger Peter Palmer

London, Globe Theatre: ‘Edges of Rome’ Jill Barlow

Blonay Report: Contemporary String Quartets Leo Hepner

Further London reports Paul Conway, Jill Barlow

• Manchester International Festival Tim Mottershead

• Zagreb: 24th Music Biennale Donata Premeru

• Amsterdam, Nederlands Opera: John Adams and Jonathan Harvey Malcolm Miller

• New York and Boston: Nico Muhly Rodney Lister

• Birmingham: Tansy Davies Paul Conway

• Manchester and London: Bainbridge and Meredith John Wheatley

• Additional reviews by Malcolm Miller, Paul Conway, Jill Barlow

London, Barbican: Henze's ‘Scorribanda Sinfonica’ Malcolm Miller

Huddersfield: Contemporary Music Festival, 2006 Paul Conway

London: White, Smith and Hinton Martin Anderson

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Lachenmann John Wheatley

California, Napa: Anders Hillborg's ‘Arietta Quartet’ Jeff Dunn

London: Finnish premières Martin Anderson

London, Warehouse: Finnissy's ‘Back to Earth’ Jill Barlow

London, Barbican: Pintscher and Fedele Malcolm Miller

• Jukebox Blues Robin Maconie

• ‘New Music, New Allies‘ Rodney Lister

• Cornelius Cardew – A Reader James Weeks