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Considering the reputation of the Southbank Centre as a major British authority on new music and art, their playing host to ‘The New Experimentalists’ in January seemed a long time coming. From an institution one year into its twentieth-century musical extravaganza, The Rest Is Noise Festival, an evening highlighting new and recent works by four leading experimental artists came as a welcome break from an exhaustive list of twentieth-century ‘classics’.

  The first musical celebration of the 1916 centenary that I came across was Simon O'Connor's Left Behind , which was first heard in Dublin this time last year. O'Connor's set of intimate songs, imagining 1916 through the experience of the wives of the rebel leaders, is currently on tour, and will make it to the National Concert Hall with the RT Concert Orchestra on Wednesday, April 27th, when the Ergodos label's album of the work will also be launched. It is more than curious that none of the big names of Irish music of the time seems to have attempted to mark the Rising in music. And the elegiac tone of [Arnold Bax]'s sextet might almost have served as a model for Simon O'Connor's ballads and even impinged on Donnacha Dennehy's The Dark Places , premiered as part of the Imagining Home project. After all, Colm Tibn's text for this piece ends with the words: \"All silence, no tears / More than they could bear.\" Sorrow and loss continue to hold us in greater thrall than the idea of a new order in the offing. The Rising commemorations are somehow sad. This is true in John Kinsella's The Splendid Years , written for the 75th anniversary in 1991, which tastefully layers traditional music (Cormac Jean Breatnach on whistle) with his own musical voice, and also in Roger Doyle's reserved Steal a Kiss (Laoise Kelly on harp) and Sam Perkin's Pause , for strings, electronics, voice and audience, in which the audience is left at the end to continue humming quietly where the musicians on stage leave off.

  13 Vices features three classical musicians from Scotland's contemporary music group 'Red Note Ensemble', three of Europe's finest free improvising musicians - Paul Dunmall (saxophone), Paul Rogers (double bass) and Mark Saunders (percussion).

  \"Everyone knows that if you learn how to play a piece of music you experience it in a different way to if you're just listening to it,\" says Dr Jennifer Walshe, an acclaimed Irish composer who lectures at Brunel University, in London. \"And what [Beck Hansen]'s doing, though it seems like an almost retrogressive move, it's actually very now. It's like Jay-Z's Black Album, which everyone sampled and remixed, and that was part of the fun of that album - all the different remixes that were done and the weird clashes between them.\" Walshe also notes that university music departments are starting to look in the opposite direction, at untrained musicians. \"I think it's interesting that Beck is bringing out a song album with notation as the universities are thinking about how to integrate musicians who can't read music,\" she says. \"Say you have this kid who's really amazing at writing dubstep but can't read or write music: how do you teach that kid and not bar their entrance to the university?\" Such \"graphic scores\" began in earnest with Earle Brown in the 1950s, and they often aim for indeterminate results. \"Notation is changing all the time,\" says Walshe. \"It will be interesting to see what it looks like in 50 years' time.\"

As a statement of intent by an incoming principal conductor, [Alan Buribayev]'s approach to [Tchaikovsky]'s Pathetique was full of promise. The conducting was painstaking on matters of dynamics and balance. The soft playing created a hush factor that the orchestra rarely seems to aspire to, the climaxes lifted the roof, and a myriad of internal detail was revealed through the exercise of restraint by the weightier instruments, the encouragement of the lighter ones, and attention to what was at the bottom of the musical argument as well as what was on the top. It was as close to a virtuoso performance of Tchaikovsky's warhorse as I've heard from this orchestra.