Right about now, Christian Winther Christensen should have been standing in front of a room full of people, introducing this year’s edition of the ‘avant-garde music festival’ Klang. Then 2020 happened. Klang has been commuted to November, when it will take a more modest, domestic form. Very little about this spring feels normal and that includes my meeting with Christensen. We walk hesitantly into a café near his studio in Nørrebro and order food and coffee, which are dutifully delivered to a table. It’s the first day in more than two months such decadence has been permitted in Denmark. Every small element of pleasure involved in the process is magnified.

Normally when I cover a festival, I have to at least try and maintain a certain degree of professional critical distance. In this case, it is simply not realistic. It is probably not possible to be closer to the Pulsar festival than I currently am without being directly in it myself. I am a recent graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where I studied for four years, which meant four years of having my works played at Pulsar. I know all the teachers and the majority of the students personally. I know how this festival works behind the scenes. I am even working for the festival’s education outreach project – going into gymnasiums with the student composers, and moderating presentations of their works – which means I have some insider knowledge of the pieces beforehand.

A few years ago I indulged the fantasy that most interesting Nordic music written in the last nine decades was, to some extent, a reaction to Sibelius’s symphonic poem Tapiola (1926). In my mind, Sibelius’s score had come to embody the very essence of both an ending and a beginning; its ultimate tabula rasa, in a purifying B major, representing not just a semi-conscious prelude to the composer’s own three-decade silence but also a laying of the ground for a new aesthetic, one for the coming generations to define.

Sometimes a debut concert is not really a debut concert. Bára Gísladóttir had released three albums, won a spree of awards and heard her works performed by the Iceland Symphony and Frankfurt Radio Orchestras before she checked-out of the Royal Danish Academy of Music last week, on Wednesday, with this performance. Her career appears to have moved far beyond the confines of that institution and she had no use for its concert hall on this occasion, instead luring hundreds of curious folk away from the city and up to Denmark’s prototype for Reykjavík’s Hallgrímskirkja, Grundtvig’s Church in the Bispebjerg district of Copenhagen.

Seismograf doesn’t normally sit down for a chat with ensembles but has made an exception for Neko3 on the grounds that a) the group itself isn’t very normal and b) if you haven’t already found yourself in one of its audiences, you’re probably about to. In the coming weeks, Neko3 will be pretty much unavoidable for the sorts of people who read articles like this one. Not that you’re Neko3’s target market. The ensemble rails against the peripatetic nature of the contemporary classical music audience: the same people at the same concerts for the same (mostly professional) reasons. Something of that thought process sprang the group into adolescence after the baby steps of its first concert in November 2017.

‘Could you review Marcela Lucatelli’s debut concert? It’s likely to be absolute mayhem.’ Sure I can and yes it was.

We might as well start with the dogs. The first dog was the soft toy dog dragged on stage by the policeman in the latex bondage uniform.

The second dog was the stuffed fox on the skateboard (fair enough, not a dog but four legs, sharp teeth and a furry tail).

Donaueschinger Musiktage is one of the world’s oldest and most historied contemporary music festivals, and has been taking over the tiny town of Donaueschingen – population: 22,000 – in Southwest Germany every October since 1921.

It is a massive cultural event, selling out months in advance.

No venue is smaller than colossal, even the smallest chamber concerts selling out packed auditoriums in a way Danish festivals such as Klang, Spor, Gong Tomorrow, etc. could only dream of – even competing with the largest audiences for a DR orchestra concert.

How do you write about a festival that, in practical terms, does not actually exist?

Obviously, it does exist in the sense that it is an event that takes place: every year thirty-five young composers convene somewhere in one of the Nordic countries and hear each other’s pieces – this year, Piteå in Sweden.

But there is no centre to the Young Nordic Music festival (UNM, Ung Nordisk Musik). There is no artistic director, no programming council, no board of directors, no administrative leader.

In October, Icelandic composer-conductor Daníel Bjarnason will be in Los Angeles, briefing three conductors at the first rehearsal for his new orchestral work From Space I Saw Earth.

Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta – the current music director of the LA Phil and his two living predecessors – will all conduct the new piece at Disney Hall on 24 October, celebrating 100 years of the best orchestra on America’s west coast.

‘I often come back to keeping things simple in my music, because there’s more power in simplicity,’ says the composer, talking about the score for large symphony orchestra and organ partitioned along invisible lines thus requiring three separate conductors; ‘by simple, I don’t necessarily mean simplistic.’

Amazing. Beautiful. Creative. Emotional. Sensual. Talented. Complex. Just some of the words Marta Śniady uses in the video part of Probably the Most Beautiful Music in the World (2018) to describe her own music.

But are they her descriptions? Are they other people’s descriptions? Are they about this piece? Are they about what we should value in art? Is Śniady bragging?  Is she telling the audience what to think? Is she lying? Perhaps selling herself? Poking fun at the structures of contemporary music? Openly engaging and toying with them? Reappropriating the unavoidably horrible networking aspect of being a composer, and building an entire piece around it? And why do I keep hearing the McDonald’s theme tune?