This article discusses the way textile metaphors can act as catalysts for reflection in my practice as a trumpet performer and composer. Metaphors such as ‘fibre’, ‘spin’, ‘yarn’, ‘ply’, ‘weave’, ‘loom’, ‘drape’ and ‘felt’ are engaged as lenses through which the dynamic, contingent and tailorable interactions are made between sonic and extra-sonic elements in my expanded practice. The metaphors are engaged to shape instrumental techniques, improvisation, form, audiovisual media, physicality and spatial design. In this article, I describe how I developed my own expanded sonic practice by using Tim Ingold's concept of ‘textility’, expressed as a Textile Sonic Method (TSM). I demonstrate the application of this method using a subset of textile metaphors as the basis for the development of new double-bell trumpet techniques and applications in a range of compositions: Gradient (2020–23), for double-bell trumpet, live video and sound processing, co-composed with Olivia Davies and Nick Roux; Untitled (2021), for double-bell trumpet, portative organ and electronics, co-composed with James Rushford; and my own work Charcoal VI (2017), for spatialised, amplified double-bell trumpet. This article outlines the potential for the application of metaphor as a creative catalyst in an expanded sonic practice.

Hans Abrahamsen and Paul Griffith's let me tell you has been received with unusual adulation since its premiere in 2013. This article explores the work's place within the broader context of European literature, music and art, before shifting to a consideration of the piece's subtle hybrid form and its unique rhythmic structures. Abrahamsen's great interest in close (but not exact) symmetrical relationships is considered at some length, and the influence of figures ranging from St Augustine to Joyce, Bach to Webern, Caspar David Friedrich to Per Kirkeby is also observed. Extensive conversations with the composer in recent years provide primary material, and Abrahamsen's fascination with the musical properties of time – its construction and its destruction – displayed in these conversations has informed the decision to structure the article around these twin properties of form and rhythm.

This article investigates intervallic measurement and the tacit limitations engendered by a prevalent symmetrical perspective of measuring intervals. Various numerical and instrumental limitations and further detail of harmonic and melodic structures, such as Farey sequences, are illustrated. This approach distinguishes itself from a perspective of prime limits, explored by Harry Partch and others. A standardisation of ‘microtonal’ notation is not suggested; rather, the restrictions provided by any such standardisation are re-examined through an objective lens of ratios, to harness the generative potential of numbers. An orchestration-led approach to composition is described, where the tuning limitations of instruments are utilised for idiomatic composition. Tuning practices that ‘evade’ the octave are also discussed, including gamelan, mbira and three scales found by Wendy Carlos. The article concludes with a section on the construction of harmonic systems in the absence of instrumental influences.

This article discusses responses to the survey-score Where are we Going? and What have we Done?, which sets out to explore how Anglophone composers choose to ground the impacts of their compositional practice. The composers’ responses primarily centred around the psychosocial impacts of composition, and the article unpicks some of the implications of this focus. The article then details the effect the survey-score had on my own composing, before outlining the affordances of narrative approaches to the act of scoring, and their ability to shine a brighter light on the impacts of our practice, both retrospectively and also with regards to future performances.

This article draws on published interviews and personal correspondence with the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937) to situate the development of his musical aesthetics and international reputation within the context of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022. In particular, the article focuses on Silvestrov's use of sacred musical genres as a means of engaging directly with his contemporary political environment; it also explores the ways in which Silvestrov and his music have recently become an unequivocal symbol of defiance in the face of Russian aggression, a position that stands in stark contrast to the avowed disinterestedness in and removal from politics that characterised his works of the 1970s and 1980s.

Autoschediasms, the American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey's conception of spontaneous composition, casts the participants as equals. The decision-making power is balanced between Sorey and the instrumentalists. Focusing on the 2020 performance of Autoschediasms by Sorey and the contemporary-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, presented as part of the ensemble's Video Chat Variations series, this article limns the experience of Autoschediasms and asks: what is the sensory counterpart to Sorey's democratic ethos? In Autoschediasms, I argue, it is timbre that synchronises the performers’ interactions, in all their care and openness, with the pressures and freedoms of listening. Timbre activates absorbing, unforeseen, manifold variation in the composition. This sonic impression of democratic music-making around and across difference comes to reflect the conditions of radical humanity and vulnerability inherent in spontaneity. Through close listening, and in dialogue with critical improvisation studies and timbre theory, I suggest that Autoschediasms illuminates the ethical dimension of timbre: what timbre can do for the aspiration towards musical inclusivity.

A striking instrumental design innovation in recent years has been the development of the Paetzold ‘square bass’ bass recorders, sparking interest among performers and composers to develop a new approach to contemporary performance practice and electroacoustic composition. This article examines two works by Australian composers that have been performed by the author. Both pieces are written for the Paetzold contrabass recorder in F, applying its unique sound palette within different compositional approaches and structures. The electroacoustic works surveyed also use a fixed media soundscape drawing on varying levels of gesture and improvisation from the live performer(s). The works present different relationships between the pre-recorded soundscape and the contrabass recorder and provide an opportunity for the performer to experiment with the large range of sounds possible. This article also serves as a summary of tools, sounds and techniques for composers interested in writing for the instrument.

This article discusses Nautilus (2022), a composition for solo bass flute created using machine-learning techniques and a Unity game engine. We consider the approaches we adopted and how they enhanced creativity and musicianship for those involved. We reflect on Unity's potential as a novel and flexible driver for the creation of a musical score in which traditional elements of compositional design are presented to a performer as a co-creator for interpretation and communication inside the act of musicking. Through this we offer insights into performer agency and how a performer decodes media, sound, images and AI through their instrument, personal skills and musical aesthetic. We describe how the notion of a music score was re-conceptualised, transforming our understanding of the activities of composition, collaboration and performance.

This paper proposes an approach to the representation of mental musical space, understood here as a mental ‘hologram’ of a musical structure created while composing or listening to a piece of music. Composers claim to ‘hear’ music in their mind and ‘see’ it in their spatial imagination; normally we see music graphically represented on two-dimensional staves, but we could mentally decode it in a three- or multi-dimensional space, and I argue that Violeta Dinescu's musical vision occupies a non-Euclidean imaginary musical space rather than the Western classical-music template. Dinescu's graphical design suggests a hyperbolic space, distorting the musical parameters accordingly. Two of her works are discussed: Gehen wir zu Grúschenka, for cello with voice ad libitum, and Herzriss – Aus deinem Herzen kannst du die Liebe nicht ausreißen, an opera for solo voice(s), percussion and cello. The first views the behaviour of musical parameters as if in an imaginary hyperbolic space; the latter exemplifies intertextuality in a cultural hyperbolic space. Both are metaphors of the woman's soul.

Elliott Carter's programme notes for his String Quartet No. 5 describe it as being about the embodiment of human interaction within the rehearsal process. This article develops this concept, evaluating the musical figures that are foreshadowed by the fragments that Carter suggests are rehearsal outtakes. Certain motives are reiterated and developed through slight variations, thus exemplifying the rehearsal process, and perhaps the editorial process, in detail. Interactions within this model are suggestive of the character types that Carter has delineated in his previous string quartets, notably No. 2. Using the Practice Session model also alludes to the real-life circumstances of the preparation of previous quartets by ensembles, and anecdotes about the Juilliard Quartet's rehearsals for the premiere of the String Quartet No. 3 can enhance a narratological understanding of the No. 5's construction. Finally, String Quartet No. 5 is considered as an example of one of the transitional works that initiate Carter's late style and its consolidation of material; its use of all-interval chords, their subsets and supersets reflects the constructive elements of human interaction that Carter has stressed as a principal thematic element.