Does intimacy have anything to do with music? Music – especially acoustic chamber music – is regularly, even unthinkingly, labelled intimate. The implications of this common-enough usage were the major preoccupation of the most recent London Contemporary Music Festival. With multiple images and varieties of intimacy foregrounded – bodily, sexual, aural, psychological, somnolent – Igor Toronyi Lalic's curation was masterful. By turns provocative, baffling, emotional and ear-averting, not without some irony, the concerts were held in a vast underground concrete room.

Johannes Kreidler has written an opera. This is, alongside Alexander Schubert making Ensemble Intercontemporain sync up to strobe lights and Jennifer Walshe making Lucas Fels do a silly dance, a symptom of the inevitable institutionalisation of former iconoclasts who less than half a decade ago were still being championed as figures who, in Michael Rebhahn's polemic terms, ‘resigned from New Music’. But Kreidler does not seem to feel threatened by this. Indeed, his willingness to adopt the official genre of opera without qualification – in contrast to Ferneyhough's ‘thought opera’, Lachenmann's ‘musik mit Bildern’, and the more common designations of ‘music theatre’ or ‘musical action’ – signifies just how comfortable he is with his position as an established composer.

Pascal Dusapin is a French intellectual – he cites the philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a particular inspiration – whose generation (he was born just a few months before Michel Houellebecq) are now to the fore following the death of Pierre Boulez. A student of Xenakis in Paris, he sometimes gives the titles of his works a linguistic quirkiness, as in for example, Ici, Iti, Incisa and Indeed. His comment on Outscape, his second cello concerto, that ‘it's difficult for me to explain my work because the substance of thought is confused with the flow of music’ is – given his musical pedigree and cultural milieu – unsurprising.

Brazil's foremost ensemble of the late twentieth century, Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, transformed Brazilian contemporary music by cultivating a new mixed-chamber repertory and giving sustained support to a generation of emerging composers. That this cosmopolitan group took, then outgrew, the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone signals the medium it forged: a localized, evolving spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage. This article offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underpin Grupo Novo Horizonte's practices and legacy. Analysing landmark works by Sílvio Ferraz, Harry Crowl and others allows us to draw further connections between the group, the Brazilianness of late twentieth-century compositional aesthetic, and the realities of contemporary classical music-making in Brazil.

In an industry where the brand new and the first performance are fixated upon, Ultraschall Berlin is to be applauded for being less interested in presenting a glut of premieres than in cultivating a twenty-first-century tradition. At this year's festival, its twentieth edition, only a quarter of the 69 works performed were world premieres, with just four of them commissioned by the two organisations presenting the festival, state broadcasters rbb and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Growing out of Soundpool, a York-based composer/performer collective of the 1980s, Late Music York has been promoting new music in York for over 20 years. Composers and commissions featured in their concerts have included Frederic Rzewski, Michael Finnissy, Judith Weir, Anna Meredith and Howard Skempton. Their latest series is equally broad, with music ranging from David Bowie to Tristan Murail (not forgetting younger local composers); the series can never be accused of having a narrow agenda. This review aims to contrast two separate events to give an idea of the range and variety one has come to expect from Late Music concerts.

At the beginning of July, the University of Leeds played host to the ‘Performing Indeterminacy’ conference: a series of talks, panels and concerts that are part of a research project on John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), led by Philip Thomas and Martin Iddon. In the middle of all this, Apartment House presented what many consider the pinnacle of Cage's indeterminate work alongside a new commission from Christian Wolff, the last surviving member of the New York School composers. Resistance (2016–17), Wolff's new work ‘for 10 or more players and a pianist’, was written in response to Cage's Concert, sharing elements of its instrumentation and schema. In Leeds’ Clothworkers Hall, Apartment House – led by Anton Lukoszevieze – premiered the new piece alongside its progenitor, composed some 59 years apart. At the heart of both pieces in this concert is Philip Thomas at the piano. The conscientiousness and exactitude that Thomas brings to the music of both Cage and Wolff (having worked closely with the latter over the past 15 years) make him, perhaps, the ideal soloist for this programme. Quite simply, it is a line-up that could not have come about through chance procedure.

The audience sits blindfolded in concentric circles, facing away from the performer. Refusing any visual accompaniment, and presenting sounds from his vast archive of field recordings without context or explicit identification, field recordist and sound artist Francisco Lopez asks the audience to wear these blindfolds to remove any distraction, and encourages them towards an intense focus on the sonic material he is about to present. Lopez describes the blindfolds as a ‘voluntary commitment to listening’. He believes that sounds are ‘things’, physical entities that have character(s) and substance. What follows is a bewildering array of material: rural, urban, animal, elemental.

For one week in March, a bitterly cold Berlin became a hotspot for hard-hitting, radical and politically engaged music making, as MaerzMusik welcomed some of the most forward-thinking composers, performers, speakers and thinkers through its doors. With by far the most representation across the week's events, it was composer/producer/DJ/transgender activist Terre Thaemlitz who assumed the role of unofficial artist-in-residence, with her appearances spanning two concerts, a talk, a DJ set (under pseudonym DJ Sprinkles) and a 30-hour performance of his latest album Soullessness, which was installed over the festival's opening weekend at the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

Now in its thirteenth season, Music We'd Like to Hear is an established presence in London's new music calendar. And true to form, the second concert in this year's triple bill, named (UN)PREDICTABLE, programmed a host of new works, including the UK premieres of Makiko Nishikaze's trio-stella and Alvin Lucier's Twonings, the world premiere of Paul Newland's things that happen again (again), and Tom Johnson's Predictables, all performed by Mira Benjamin (violin), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), and Philip Thomas (piano).

Donaueschingen is three (and a half) days of nearly constant concerts; this review is around 3000 words. I have divided it into two sections. The first details the concerts that either I or the Donaueschingen audience considered to be of particular note, one way or another. The second deals with approaches to musical practice and issues raised by certain talks and performances. The date of composition for all of the pieces mentioned below is 2017 unless otherwise stated.

Simon Løffler's b presents to its audience an immediate question: where are the instruments? Three players sit on straight-backed chairs, joined by a daisy-chain of cables and guitar stomp boxes. The score directs a choreography of foot switching, demanding extraordinary pedal dexterity. Sounds pass down the line, modulated by distortion and equaliser effects, before bursting out of the PA in a series of abrupt electrical barks. But at the other end of the line there is nothing but an unplugged jack, held aloft, inserted nowhere but the open air.

‘Music is a dark world of meaningless abstraction, of memory and longing.’ These words by Niels Rønsholdt boldly opened his new opera Gaze for Gaze, created collaboratively with the ensemble and music theatre collective SCENATET. Gaze for Gaze was one of the cornerstones of SPOR's 2018 programming, shown three times to an intimate sold-out audience of around 40 people. The piece's clever twist – text was delivered by audience members sitting in a circle around the work's two lead performers, with the rest of the musicians performing behind the audience – brought to the fore many of SPOR's curatorial themes: absence, substitution, and darkness.

Elliott Carter's quotable 80s slur – ‘about one minute of minimalism is a lot, because it is all the same’ – was happily not applicable at this year's GAIDA festival in Vilnius. The 2017 programme of the biggest contemporary music festival in the Baltic States displayed many diverse faces of repetitive music and more besides, with a particular focus on eclectic post-minimalist David Lang (who pointedly denounced -isms and post-s in his programmed talk).