Abstract This article reflects upon the nature of ornamentation and how it applies within my recent works, Passacaglia (2021), Tor (2022), Fourteen transcriptions from across the plane (plain) (2023), and Through Gates Unseen (2023). I express ornamentation as a multifaceted set of activities which include the figurative, behavioural, layered and architectural. These components broadly move from the smallest sound unit to that of macro-level concerns. I argue that this behavioural aspect of ornamentation is exemplified by states of transition, density, kinetic energy, articulation and the organic. Here, ornamentation is used to distort and destabilise, as a vehicle for modulation, and as a framework for exploratory play between global and local-level details.

what's haunting michael zev gordon?postmemory

Abstract This article presents an overview of findings from an ERC-funded DigiScore project that investigates how digital technologies are reshaping music creation, performance and accessibility. Digital scores, defined as interactive interfaces for musical ideas, enable innovative compositional approaches, immersive performance experiences and inclusive practices. Drawing on nearly 50 case studies across five continents, the research highlights four key impacts: (1) enhanced interactivity and multimedia integration; (2) non-linear and real-time compositional methods; (3) novel performance opportunities in physical and virtual spaces; (4) broader accessibility for diverse musicians and audiences. An overview of case studies by the project’s partners and principal investigator illustrates how digital scores impact the creative practices of composers and performers, while also influencing audience engagement and fostering collaboration and participation. Despite challenges in balancing technological complexity with usability, the findings demonstrate how digital scores democratise music-making, offering new creative possibilities and redefining contemporary musical practices.

Works of art are messages from a 'foreign country' in which, as L. P. Hartley tells us at the beginning of The Go-Between, 1 'they do things differently.'Their subject matter -love, loss, adventure, anxiety -may be timeless, but time is written into the way it is expressed, each work a time-capsule packed with information about how things used to be communicated.In 1995 Neil Heyde was working closely with Justin Connolly on the development of Connolly's solo cello work, Collana.At a late stage in Heyde's preparations for the premiere Connolly wrote him a long letter, going through the piece section by section, reflecting on his compositional decisions and offering suggestions as to how Heyde might meet the music's challenges.The letter is, as Heyde suggests in the title of his article, a 'time-capsule': Connolly died in 2020 but the letter preserves his ideas about Collana and Heyde explains how they have informed his recent recording of the work.Heyde also considers how his response to Connolly's letter might relate to the burgeoning research area of composer-performer collaboration, or CPC as it is usually known.Politely, Heyde suggests that CPC has a problem 'in balancing the essential requirement of documentation with the need to establish thresholds for significance'; less politely, I would suggest that many CPC projects replace the forensic critique of Connolly's thoughts on Collana with acquiescent autoethnography.Ed Cooper's article on 'post-critique and "The New Discipline"' addresses another example of critical acquiescence, the current tendency to avoid a critical interrogation of texts, in whatever medium, and instead to respond to new work in a mode that is both 'complementary and complimentary.'It will be interesting to see what sort of response is triggered by Cooper's article.I suspect that some readers may mistake his detailed scrutiny of Jennifer Walshe's original 'New Discipline' text, carefully disentangling its significance from its reception, as hostility; to be properly understood the article needs to be read attentively and, as Cooper proposes, 'against the grain.'One of the composers listed in the original 'New Discipline' document was Matthew Shlomowitz and in this issue he follows his TEMPO 311 provocation, 'It's not about you: do we need a "compositional voice"?,' with an article in which he argues for a revival of neo-classicism.This may seem to be very much against the grain of new music today and Shlomowitz's advocacy of 'entertainment' as a neglected aspect of contemporary classical music could well raise a few eyebrows, but perhaps neo-classicism's capacity for wit, humour and formal clarity might also attract a few more listeners.Shlomowitz offers some structural models that might characterise a neo-classical revival, one of which includes an 'unexpected and unrelated insert' whose extended presence disrupts the orderly form that frames it, and Ty Bouque's article, 'Outside inside (love)' examines why these musical parentheses are so disconcerting.For Bouque these moments are more