Aylish E. Kerrigan's book on Schoenberg's Opus 15 to be launched at the tenth Society of Musicology in Ireland conference on 15 June.

Since its invention in the eighteenth century, the string quartet has proved one of the most resilient forms, continuously reinvented and repurposed for changing times.

Was Gustav Mahler the most influential composer of the last 150 years? Two recent books by the journalist and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht claim as much; George Rafael, though, feels the question of Mahler's influence is more personal.

The idea of a common language in composition is a thing of the past: the world of contemporary music is now entirely chaotic, the result of individualism, tradition and cosmopolitanism pulling, irreconcilably, against each other.

Seventy years after the release of Citizen Kane, George Rafael looks at the close, if often tempestous, relationship between the film's director, Orson Welles, and its composer, Bernard Herrmann – and how they changed the way filmmaker

Were Arnold Schoenberg's American years really spent in frustration, poverty and obscurity?

"Our ahistorical postmodern age, with its mistrust of continuities and grand narratives, has paradoxically allowed the reinsertion of Gesualdo into musical history." A new book on the composer shows that he was centuries ahead of