Param Vir was born in Delhi in 1952 and has lived and worked in Britain since 1984. His greatest success has been in opera, and the two orchestral works in his catalogue also testify to a remarkable theatrical sensibility. Vir's music embodies and feeds off the contradictions of his life. Although rooted firmly in the modernist aesthetic of Western contemporary music, Vir's Indian background and education have left a mark on his music. His emigration has resulted in alienation from a national identity, leaving him an outsider both in India and Britain. He is contracted to a venerable English publisher – Novello & Co. – but is himself outside the contemporary music establishment and academy. These contradictions are reflected both in Vir's central themes of otherness and self-discovery and his exploration of exotic and colourful instrumental sonorities, which together make him an important and unusual voice in contemporary music.

At sixty-five a new and sustained inspiration had set him off writing poems in emulation of the fourteenth-century Persian lyricist Hafiz. … Reflection and evocation sometimes have an almost mystical intensity as past insight and experience are concentrated in fresh perceptions of beauty. The poet can see the woman he loves in every shape and stimulus of the sensible world … In loving her, he loves the world and whatever god is immanent in it; none of these loves is merely a derivate of any other, they compose a single embracing reverence…. He also discovers a sense of unity across historical time…. Life resolves into archetypes. Even so, the freshness and value of each new occasion stays intact. Archetype, recurrence, myth – the perspective they offer never blurs or attenuates the single instance.

First, the essential biographical information. Born in London on 26 July 1934, Anthony Gilbert was a relative latecomer to composition. Not until he was 19 did he start to study part time at Trinity College and not until he was 23, by which time he was working as a translator and interpreter at the London offices of the Société des Fonderies de Pont-à-Mousson of Nancy, did he begin to study composition, largely as a private pupil, with Anthony Milner, Mátyás Seiber and Alexander Goehr. It is a mark of Gilbert's determination that for the next ten years, while working in a variety of both non-musical (warehouseman and accounts clerk) and musical jobs (free-lance copyist, proof-reader and arranger) for Schotts, and full-time Music and Record Library Assistant at the City of Westminster Public Library, he not only devoted his summer holidays to studying at Dartington and Wardour Castle (with, amongst other teachers, Nono and Berio) but also found time to produce a whole series of works, including an unpublished Elegy for Piano, a Duo for violin and viola, the Piano Sonata No.1, Serenade, the Missa Brevis and the Sinfonia.

In future, those who look to anniversaries as a bulwark against the solvent flow of time will find their thoughts directed at once to Cathy Berberian who died 20 years ago in 1983, and to Luciano Berio, who died in 2003. This is apt enough. Their marriage lasted only fourteen years, from 1950 to 1964. But their creative trajectories were inextricably entwined. One does not get far in discussing the work of one without invoking the other.

Although Israeli performers are widely recognized in the international arena, serious music composed by Israeli composers is far less well known. Yet, throughout Israel's 55-year history to date, contemporary music has attained a remarkably dynamic, thriving impetus despite (and perhaps partly as a consequence of) the harsh realities of daily life. The works of four generations (and a rising fifth generation) of composers in all genres and instrumental combinations may still be known far less than they deserve across the world, yet the amount of new recordings, published studies and performances is encouraging evidence of increasing interest. This article-interview is intended to deepen appreciation of an important repertoire through an introduction to the music and ideas of one of the foremost Israeli composers, the Chicago-based Shulamit Ran, whose unique outlook is influenced by two cultures, those of Israel and America.

Messiaen's concept of ‘personnages’ is essential to his compositional and analytical thinking. Yet it is not described in his Technique of My Musical Language of 1944, and it features only sporadically in the secondary literature. There are references to personnages in Messiaen's booklet notes to recordings of the Turangalîla-symphonie, but only the basic premise of personnages rythmiques is discussed there. Messiaen's preliminary thoughts on the rhythmic aspect of the process are given in his 1939 article ‘Le rythme chez Igor Stravinsky’, but those two pages only permit fairly general comments and the label ‘personnages’ was not yet in use. We are introduced to personnages in detail at various points in his seven-volume Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie – a compilation of Messiaen's writings from 1949 onwards, edited by Alain Louvier and Yvonne Loriod and published between 1994 and 2002, the order of material having been decided by Messiaen shortly before his death. For those patient enough to negotiate its convoluted presentation, the Traité allows the reader a unique insight into Messiaen's thought-processes, his musical and technical influences, analytical style, and non-musical interests. The present article seeks to disentangle and clarify the concept of personnages, to gather the threads from various analyses in the Traité in which they appear, and to trace their progress from Messiaen's Stravinsky analysis to a pinnacle of complexity in the Turangalîla-symphonie.

Christian Wolff, who turned 70 in March this year, is the last remaining member of the so-called New York School of Composers. Very briefly he studied with John Cage, and was exchanging thoughts with Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and David Tudor from the age of 16 in 1950. Along with friends and colleagues Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, he began in the 1970s to draw upon musical ideas that reflected his social and political concerns in a more direct manner. The following is an extract of a much longer interview which took place during the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2002 where Christian Wolff was a featured composer. Wolff discusses his recent compositions, his attitude to writing for voice, and his approach to performance and to begin with, recording.

The towering international reputation of Toru Takemitsu has dominated the West's perceptions of contemporary Japanese music, a situation resulting in the relative neglect of other worthy composers. This phenomenon has parallels in other countries, such as France, where Boulez's and Messiaen's overshadowing reputations were factors in the delayed international recognition of Barraqué and Ohana. Accordingly, various important composers who have established significant profiles within Japan during the last 40 years have struggled to achieve attention beyond Asian borders. Some have established cult reputations within contemporary music circles, but more widespread recognition through recordings has been compromised by limited Western distribution of the two Japanese labels that have promoted the post-Takemitsu generations: Camerata and Fontec. Fortunately, the websites for these labels have provided an opportunity for curious Westerners to directly purchase much important music that is ripe for discovery in Western concert halls. Another positive development is the recent release of European recordings of important new Japanese works.

The composer and writer Trevor Hold, who died on 28 January, was an occasional contributor to Tempo over the years; perhaps his most substantial article being the meticulously researched ‘Grieg, Delius, Grainger and a Norwegian Cuckoo’ in Tempo 203 (January 1998). His latest contributions, a book review and CD review, appeared as recently as the January issue of this year, a few days before his death.

Judith Bingham was born in Nottingham in 1952, and grew up in Mansfield and Sheffield. After making considerable self-taught progress in composition while still a schoolgirl, she attended the Royal Academy of Music (1970–73), where her teachers were Malcolm MacDonald, Eric Fenby Alan Bush and John Hall (composition), and Jean Austin-Dobson (singing). In 1972 she was awarded the Academy's ‘Principal's Prize for Composition’ for the ‘Fires of London’-influenced chamber-piece Maelstrom. After obtaining her Performer's Certificate, she continued her composition studies privately with Hans Keller (1974–80), and took singing lessons from Eric Vietheer and David Mason. In 1976 she was selected for the BBC's ‘Young Composers' Forum’ on the strength of two scores: The Divine Image (1976) for harpsichord, and The Fourth Universe (1976) for mezzo-soprano and harpsichord.

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Nicholas Jones and Anthony Powers in Lower Breinton, Hereford, on 28 April 2003. Square-bracketed dates and other parentheses are editorial.

In a recent issue of Tempo, you published a letter from Jon C. Mitchell which contained an implication that I, amongst others, had somehow claimed ‘ownership’ of Gustav Holst and his music. I would like to make it clear that I have never made any such claim, and that any such assertions are completely false.

When someone asked Schoenberg if he was indeed Schoenberg, he replied: ‘Someone had to be’.

MANSURIAN: Monodia. Viola Concerto (‘…and then I was in time again’); Violin Concerto; Lachrymae; Confessing with Faith. Kim Kashkashian (via), Leonidas Kavakos (vln), Jan Garbarek (ss), The Hilliard Ensemble, Münchener Kammerorchester c. Christoph Poppen. ECM New Series 472 7842 (2-CD set).

Two of the most important goals for music composition during the past century were innovation and originality. In reaching for these goals, many composers abandoned tonal protocol, looking instead for new ways to generate coherence in their music. In the absence of traditional voice leading based on tonic/dominant harmony, some composers gravitated toward the use of symmetry. By symmetry I mean the projection of a series of events above and below, or forward and backward from a central axis, with a one-to-one correspondence between events on one side of the axis and those on the other. In this article, I will focus primarily on vertical symmetry in pitch space. Because horizontal symmetry often accompanies vertical symmetry, however, it cannot be set aside altogether. George Crumb's La luna está muerta, muerta… from Night of the Four Moons, for example, contains several symmetrical pitch collections, arranged in the manner of a balanced arch-form. As Ex. 1 illustrates, four pitch sets, comprising a single symmetrical interval series, occur over the course of the composition. The pitch sets in the first half of the composition, moreover, are presented in reverse order – and, hence, upside down – in the second half, transferring symmetry into the linear dimension; the events in the second half of the piece, that is, mirror those in the first half, just as the intervals above the pitch axis mirror those below it in each of the pitch collections.

The influence of the rhythmic and harmonic ideas derived from Anthony Gilbert's study of birdsong made itself apparent in his works of the mid and late 1970s, firstly in the radio opera The Chakravaka-Bird, many sections of which are based on overlapping short figurations (Gilbert calls them ‘mantras’) that, like the calls of a large body of different birds singing together, are repeated at measured intervals to produce larger rythmic cycles; and then in Towards Asâvari, which was written in Australia in the spring (that is to say the Australian spring – between August and December) of 1978.

We trust the word is not too forthright, but ‘puerile’ might legitimately be levied against the new opera Berenice by Johannes Maria Staud. Premièred on 12 May this year as part of the 9th Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre at the city's Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, this first attempt at the genre by the Austrian-born composer Staud renders, blow by blow, the short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. The libretto, by Durs Grünbein, sticks closely to the famous writer's narrative like epoxy resin. Played without an interval, Berenice comes in at just under two hours; it seemed like two days.

May I, in the wake of Mark Doran's excellent and searching review of Jan Swynnoe's book on British Film Music (Tempo no. 226: October 2003), make one or two observations of my own?:

SCHOENBERG: String Quartets Nos.1–4; String Quartet in D major; Presto in C major; Scherzo in F major. Aron Quartet (Ludwig Müller, Barna Kobori, Georg Hamann, Christophe Pantillon) with Anna Maria Pammer (sop). Preiser Records PR 90572 (3-CD set).