Each year the South Bank's showcase of young composers seems to grow in scope and ambition. What began as an initiative by the London Sinfonietta is now a joint venture between eight organisations, and stretches to include sound installations, improvisation sessions, even a film of music for the catwalk. Boundaries are deliberately blurred, recognising the fact that for the generation born in the 70s new music draws upon a wider frame of reference than it has ever done before, and that the London Sinfonietta itself is an ensemble born out of a much narrower concept of radicalism.
Whether by being opened out like this State of the Nation manages to be more inclusive, or whether it is just paying lip service to fledgling traditions at the expense of the tradition that is its natural constituency, is another question. More crucially, one wonders if the new music audience is as catholic in its tastes as this year's programme would have us believe, or whether those who turned up for the late-night electro-mix preview of the Hayward Gallery's Sonic Boom exhibition were the same faithful who had attended the more conventional concerts earlier in the day. If not, then maybe boundaries are less transparent than some would like to believe. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that among the pieces I heard over the weekend, the least convincing and most pretentious were those that tried to cross those boundaries, combining live music with film and electronics, for instance, to the disadvantage of all three mediums.
It's in the nature of events like this that the indifferent music is likely to outweigh the genuinely worthwhile, though all of the composers will have benefited enormously from hearing their work performed by the expert Sinfonietta players under Pierre-André Valade. There were some striking exceptions. Alberti Addict, by the 28-year-old Joe Duddell, was confidently shaped, even if its language was an unlikely amalgam - a mixture of Glass, Andriessen and Copland. Ouroboros by Jonathan Cole (born 1970) may have been slightly too long, but was remarkably well imagined.
Among the shorter works, Dai Fujikura's Frozen Heat was a propulsive brass study in jagged accents, and Mary Bellamy's Stellar a disciplined exploration of a single thematic process. Tom Ingoldsby's Fanfare "from the back of beyond" was a bubbling array of rhythmic figures that got form and content just about in balance. Too many of the pieces in the programmes really didn't manage that at all.
• Hear and Now on Radio 3 will broadcast highlights from the weekend on Friday evening.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
