January 3, 2013 saw me apprehensively lobbing into the great city of Southampton for the Royal Musical Association’s yearly postgraduate conference. This august affair lasts roughly the same time it took Christ to die and rise again (but packs far more into the stingily triduan timespan). In addition to presenting a paper of my own (I got the graveyard session, held the morning after the conference dinner), I attended about 20 others, as well as keynote addresses, a handful of helpful advisory sessions (in which we, aspiring academics all, were corralled into lecture theatres and methodically disillusioned about our career prospects), and numerous coffee breaks, in which I awkwardly attempted small talk with fellow conference-goers (though mostly I fell into an Oxford clique, which, in its Oxford way, was scarcely less awkward). What a knees-up it was – a tremendous way to usher in the new year.

Anyhow, after my paper (on Pärt’s Miserere and Josquin’s Miserere mei, Deus) had tiredly come and gone, I was followed by Jessica Ruth Morris of Cardiff University, who perked everybody up with a talk entitled ‘Postminimalism in Music’. Postminimalism – it’s an elusive term indeed, on whose very intractability Ruth spoke informatively and...