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This article is an investigation into how cultural debates are staged within the planning hearing for a new concert hall in Edinburgh. Through an analysis of the hearing and interviews with protagonists, it shows how the material, in this case the proposed concrete cladding, functions within a cultural controversy, providing an excellent example of how materials are socially mediated. The findings suggest that the debates over cultural impact and elitism rehearsed in the hearing are inextricably tied to two opposing ontologies of concrete, one very fixed, the other far more open. It is argued that planning hearings are an under-explored area in which cultural policy is effected, though the entwinement – indeed co-constitution – of material and cultural issues shows that the course and eventual conclusion of these debates are highly complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the precarious working lives of 'emerging' composers attempting to build a career in the world of new classical music in the UK. This topic is approached by considering the 'composition opportunity', success in which is seen as an important element in 'making it' in this sphere. We argue that such schemes in fact manifest a crucial tension in the nature of artistic labour, and are, at the very least, problematic in their function as conduits towards full professional identity. They may instead act to maintain the precarious working situation of composers in a neoliberal age. The working lives of artists are all too rarely illuminated, and new music composers are no exception; this survey of 47 emerging composers is the largest study of such individuals in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathias Spahlinger's (b. 1944) orchestral workpassage/paysage(1990) is a concentrated and nuanced investigation of continuity, a topic which the composer has also discussed in some of his writings. Spahlinger describes a ‘barbarity of continuity’ arising from the way in which listeners impose some form of continuity on whatever they are presented with, while discarding whatever does not ‘fit’ into this narrative. Adorno's assessment of temporality in new music is taken as the starting point for an analysis of the work that has issues of temporality and continuity at its heart. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]