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?

It’s hard to think of a better introduction to the world of Ragnhild May than her web shop.

On arrival, we’re greeted with a standard-looking selection of merchandise – towels, tote bags, socks – arranged in a basic web shop layout.

The model – May herself – exhibits the goods with a series of friendly grimaces emanating from a mouth with braces. The merchandise is embellished with slogans such as ‘Performance without Compromise’, ‘Art 4 U’, and ‘Always Good Art’.

Icelandic composer and double bassist Bára Gísladóttir’s compositions and performances have all the surface trappings of 21st-century avant-garde music. We find an aversion to ‘traditional’ harmony and melody, a strong preference for extended techniques, and a focus on sound-exploration that pathologically avoids standard structures.

But I have always felt that there is more to Gísladóttir’s writing than a succession of scratchy tam-tam noises and oboe multiphonics; something that can only be understood by uncovering the music through the person – through the composer/performer – rather than the other way around.