Alexander Schubert's WIKI-PIANO.NET is an internet-based score, commissioned by the author and performed by him on an international tour from 2018 to 2020. The website score contains modules of notation, text, images, video and sound that can be edited by any member of the public, similar to a Wikipedia page. This article explores the huge volume and variety of content added to the score over the first 20 months after the premiere, and the extreme compositional approaches and unusual patterns of internet behaviour displayed. Examining these contributions offers insights into the online culture of new music, including its approaches to humour, its creative competitiveness, its mastery of memes, and its sophisticated subversions of the relationship between composer, performer and audience.

Lab.Oratorium (2019) is the concluding part of Philippe Manoury's Köln Trilogy. It follows In situ (2013) and Ring (2016) in exploring the spoken voice as a musical element, the wider possibilities of the orchestra, and the use of sound spatialization and live electronics. Lab.Oratorium is also a work deeply rooted in the present. In this interview, Philippe Manoury discusses the political and poetic significance of this work, conceived as an artistic response to Europe's responsibility in the tragic situation of migrants around the Mediterranean. He also develops his thoughts on musical form, spatialization and creative process in music.

Multiphonics on vibrating strings have been an important element in my compositions since the early 1990s. In order to calculate the frequency components of so-called pure multiphonics (multiphonics consisting of harmonic partials of the fundamental) on vibrating strings, I developed my fraction windowing algorithm. The first section of this article details the use of multiphonics in my compositions and the second section discusses how the fraction windowing algorithm works and its relationship to the closely related mathematical concept of a continued fraction. The article also discusses the online apps I have developed as tools for composers and performers who are interested in using these methods in their own work on string multiphonics.

The collection of articles in TEMPO 292 provides the opportunity to examine recent research and approaches towards gender diversity in new music from an Australian perspective. The otherwise under-recognised contributions to the development of music by women and gender-diverse artists is spotlighted through academic research, industry strategies and creative approaches to music-making. Topics explored include artistic research in free improvisation, performance analysis and performativity, presented together with research findings drawn from mentorship programmes for female composers, gender diversity strategies in tertiary music education and the positive impacts of content targets in programming. Together these articles offer a wide range of perspectives on changing creation and performance practices, listening practices and audience attitudes to music in the twenty-first century. Contributors include leading scholar-performers active at the forefront of contemporary music in Australia, artists from the UK and USA, as well as national radio programmers and not-for-profit arts organisations.

The idea and meaning of ‘freedom’ in free improvisation has largely been determined by a masculine subject position. This paper proposes a thinking of free improvisation from a feminist perspective, drawing upon the writings of Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed and Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing, and on our own practices as improvising musicians. Reflecting on our own experiences in music and life, we ask: What does it mean to be a feminist free improviser? What inspires us to seek freedom through our improvisation practices? Can thinking improvisation through the lens of feminist theory inform our improvisational practices? We seek to think improvisation from a collective, inclusive origin. We posit that improvising is always, as Donna Haraway has suggested, ‘making-with’: creating, moment-to-moment, requiring interaction with the environment and its inhabitants. Free improvisation is not free if its practice is delimited by an exclusive world view. ‘Feministing’ free improvisation can challenge assumptions that undermine free improvisation's claim to freedom.

This article outlines and elucidates the methods used in my compositional work. I often find it impossible to limit my compositional approach to core theorems and describe them succinctly; my procedure and methodology often comprise opposing poles. As multi-polarity is a decisive criterion of my work, this specific dichotomy of methods and motivations is the overriding subject matter of this text. These characteristics also constitute my temperament, which is why I often perceive my pieces as very personal. This is not – at least not primarily – meant emotionally or subjectively, but in the way tasks, situations, musical works, or life itself are approached. I will examine numerous contradictory couplings within my work and explain their personal significance: Seriousness vs. Humour/Irony, Organism vs. Virtuality, Pop Music vs. New Music, Conception vs. Intuition, Expressivity vs. Introversion, and Technology vs. Romance.

James Clarke, successfully completing a PhD in composition as he turned 60, has never been afraid of challenging convention. A recent piece for unaccompanied violin, 2017-V, takes a typically abrasive look at a long-established instrumental genre, and relishes the obvious restrictions – four strings, two hands – in a forceful exploration of a single, multivalent musical idea. That idea evolves through febrile transformations to promote a connected yet never entirely stable music discourse. Various appropriate contexts are referenced in order to define and underline the music's distinctiveness.

Exaggeration as a deliberate aesthetic device has seen increased popularity with composers working in the western art music tradition in the last few decades. Their music promotes a feeling of excessiveness as an intentional compositional effect, worthy of being taken seriously. This would seem to encourage the development of analytical techniques for understanding how it works, but almost by definition exaggeration tends to be resistant to analysis, its transgressive, anti-rational character appearing incompatible with the systematic approaches associated with this discipline. This article analyses the forms of exaggeration employed in Richard Ayres's orchestral piece No. 37b (2006) and the techniques used to achieve them, developing a framework for how we might attempt to analyse exaggeration in a manner that is rigorous but sensitive to the nature of musical exaggeration. The article finishes by making the case for how exaggeration can be interpreted as sincere as well as ironic and why deliberate exaggeration has become an appropriate and attractive device for composers in the last few decades

The rise of new musicology and feminist music criticism in the 1980s prompted a rethinking of gender in Australian art music spheres and resulted in over a decade of advocacy on behalf of women music makers. Local musicological publications began to cover feminist concerns from the late 1980s, with a focus on composing women. Catalysed by the proliferation of feminist musicology internationally in the 1990s, a series of women's music festivals were held around Australia from 1991–2001 and accompanied by conferences, symposia and special-issue publications. Aesthetic concerns were at the forefront of this debate as women musicologists and practitioners were divided on the existence of a gendered aesthetic and the implications this might have. This article examines the major feminist aesthetic contributions and debates at the time and how these considerations have impacted music-making practices, with particular reference to women composers of new music.

Considerable research has been made into the harmonic properties and playability of woodwind multiphonics, while the utility of string multiphonics has received far less attention. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing amount of interest in the topic, and several publications have been devoted to acoustic guitar multiphonics. Primarily written for non-guitarist composers, these studies range from the scientific to the practical. Variously, they describe the sonic qualities of the multiphonics, discuss methods of performing them, or examine their spectral content and morphology. Until now, published research into guitar multiphonics has been limited to the acoustic guitar and has examined only its three lower strings. In this study, we analyse multiphonics on all six strings of the electric guitar and present a catalogue of harmonic aggregates on strings 3–1. We test these multiphonics on five different guitars and examine their response to three commonly used analogue effect pedals (compression, overdrive and distortion). In order to precisely indicate the spectral components and harmonic nodes, we have used the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation (HEJI).