"The incredible thing is that you (the composers) are here, talking with each other – in Europe and the United States that would almost never happen!" exclaimed Frederic Rzewski, the visiting composer/pianist whose address and subsequent concert together formed one of the "Sonic Broom" weekend's many highlights. Over two days and three evenings it was possible to enjoy live concerts, seminars, addresses and discussions involving people whose business was to discuss, define, promote and present contemporary home-grown music. Composers were brought together with music publishers, record company managers and producers, broadcasters, journalists, promoters, educators and funding agents to talk about rationales and strategies for furthering the cause. The business of writing, publishing, promoting, recording and performing music in a country the size of New Zealand drew forth some lively discussion regarding the viability of such undertakings here; though Frederic Rzewski's remark quoted above succinctly put the New Zealand way of going about things in a global perspective, perhaps touching on a strength of ours whose open-cast way of working enables and encourages creative things to happen here using whatever resources are to hand.

In general the New Zealand composer, presented in generic form, came across over the weekend as a somewhat variegated species, but with certain shared characteristics such as having a certain earthiness, and a willingness to communicate and illuminate as far as possible things about her/his work. Ten composers were given the floor on Sunday to talk about their lives and their work, and we were able to enjoy some entertaining and heartfelt dissertations from Eve de Castro Robinson, Helen Fisher, Anthony Ritchie, Peter Scholes, Philip Norman, David Downes, Victoria Kelly, Edwin Carr, Philip Dadson and John Cousins. One could have wished for another day on which more could have spoken (notable absences being people like Gareth Farr, Kenneth Young, David Farquhar, John Psathas, David Hamilton, Christopher Blake, Dorothy Buchanan, John Elmsley and Jenny McLeod; while people such as Jack Body, Ross Harris, Gillian Whitehead, Helen Bowater, Lisa Meridan-Skipp, Philip Brownlee and John Rimmer were present, but didn't give a "composer-talk" – to mention enough names to have a second day of composer-sessions that would have been as stimulating as the first) - but one had to be grateful for the participation of those we heard, bearing in mind Rzewski's comments about composers not wanting or bothering to talk with each other!

Not that sweetness and light prevailed the whole time, Edwin Carr's acerbic remarks about modernism and post-modernism causing a few eyebrows to lift and eyes to roll, and John Cousins' highlighting of perhaps the most famous line of Greg McGee's play of a few years ago, "Foreskin's Lament" and relating it to the whole ethos of being a composer working in an institution, amusing his listeners in a provocative and not always comfortable way. Younger composers had their say, two of whom provided a stark contrast in style and personality when they spoke one after the other on the second day, one describing a crisis of confidence, direction and purpose, the other exuding health, energy and boundless potential, while acknowledging and empathising with downward-spiralling aspects of the creative process.

Less uncomfortable but as fascinating was the contrast between other voices - Eve de Castro Robinson's by turns searching and analytical dissection of her own composing style was followed by Helen Fisher's eloquent plea for increased bi-cultural awareness on the part of all those involved in "New Zealand" music. Anthony Ritchie described the thrills and spills of making ends meet as a full-time free-lance composer, contrasting his experience with that of his father John Ritchie a generation previously. A pity that Edwin Carr's somewhat caustic and embittered voice was the only one representative of his generation – it would have been rewarding to have heard someone with less of an axe to grind speak about her/his experiences as an emerging composer at the time when figures like Douglas Lilburn, David Farquhar, Larry Pruden and John Ritchie were working in a climate that was anything but widely receptive to the idea of there being such a thing as New Zealand music.

As well as the fruits of discussion and argument by day, there were the evening concerts to enjoy, two of which presented pieces by New Zealand composers alongside contemporary works from different parts of the world, while another, a recital by the aforementioned Frederic Rzewski, featured some of the composer/performer's own music, as well as two pieces by other composers. On Friday evening the Ilott Concert Chamber resounded to the multifarious strains of different instrumentalists which made up "Stroma", a newly-formed Wellington-based ensemble giving its inaugural concert, called "Wind, Rain and Light". We heard five New Zealand works, as well as three pieces from the Northern Hemisphere by Takemitsu, Ligeti and Saariaho. One of the interesting things about hearing this concert was how the style of the pieces came across as being determined much less by physical and national boundaries than by the chronology of their composition. Thus Jenny McLeod's piece "For Seven", written in 1965 while the composer was studying in Germany, sounded quite unlike the other pieces, even Ligeti's Wind Quintet of a few years later (1968). McLeod's relatively severe, sparsely-textured lines now seem very much a product of the music's time (nineteen-sixties-avant-garde), the comparative absence of colour and harmonic texture marking the work out from the other pieces on the evening's programme. The composer herself acknowledged in a programme note the "coming of age" of skills and sensibilities among musicians and listeners alike in this country, enabling such an uncompromising work to be successfully performed, as it was on this occasion.

So, in what shape or form have we musically "come of age"? If the more recent New Zealand pieces performed by Stroma are any indication, then we're many things at once, refreshingly engaged in exploring very individual though recognisably ambient sound-worlds. The Philip Brownlee piece for solo piano, "Synonta", was played with consummate skill by Xenia Pestov, who commissioned the work. It sets the monumental alongside the delicate, with deep, granite-like chordal utterances alternating freely and unpredictably against filigree rhythmic fragments. In the mind's ear these particular resonances come to permeate one another, within a naturalistic framework of apparent free-choice, whose overall pattern of sequence can be enjoyed by the listener from various vantage-points. Paul Booth's "Impossible Colour" might well have employed the same visceral, high-contrast means to express the piece's idea, but the composer instead chose subtler, more muted and equivocal rhythms and textures to evoke his colour-vision, the result all the more strangely compelling for being somewhat unexpected. Michael Norris's "Wind Shear" was written for the flautist Bridget Douglas, the performer on this occasion, and is an extended virtuoso piece, taxing both the technique and stamina of the player. The piece seeks to suggest the different dynamics of Wellington's many and varied wind-motions, which here were triumphantly realised, and vigorously applauded.

The other New Zealand work was British-born local-resident James Gardner's "Fetish Effigies", dedicated to Stroma, and, like the Paul Booth and Michael Norris pieces, here given its inaugural public performance. It's a volatile and excitable work, setting different instrumental combinations very much against one another, the rich string sonorities at the opening dispelled abruptly by shrieks from wind and irruptions from percussion, upheavals which influence and modify the character of the work's progressions, which grow from each other in a wonderfully organic way. Set against more static sonorities are gamelan-like rhythmic impulses which build up to a ritual-like celebration of movement, a progression the composer might well have characterised as a musical metaphor for composition, the enlivenment of texture with rhythm by an act of "sheer will".

Setting these home-grown pieces against music by contemporary composers from other places inevitably creates wider and more varied contexts in which we can hear and recognise our own sounds and our own voices. One of Stroma's avowed goals is to do precisely this when programming concerts, giving local audiences the chance to experience these contexts "live" by playing pieces such as those of Ligeti, Takemitsu and Saariaho which we heard this evening.

Surprisingly, it took me a while to settle into the first item of the concert, which was the Takemitsu piece, "Rain Spell", whose initial sounds were something of an aural shock. I wondered whether my ears were taking time to "tune in" to the Ilott's proverbially ungrateful ambience, as I found the first few minutes of the work distinctly unatmospheric, the sounds startling my sensibilities with their stark immediacy and seeming lack of integration. With pieces such as these the visual distractions afforded by live performance can be a distinct disadvantage, and I wondered whether the music might be better served away from the traditional concert format, whose formalities seemed strangely at odds with the atmosphere evoked by the sounds. As the music progressed I became more receptive, and settled into the composer's sound-world, my trees having gradually merged into the wood, as it were.

There was no such problem with the Ligeti Wind Quintet which followed, whose sharply-etched lines and crisp rhythmic patterning spoke out clearly and brightly.. The Quintet is made up of ten short pieces, the first of which immediately proclaims the identity of its composer, with its evocative chord-clusters creating a sense of opaqueness out of which light and thought struggle to break free, in much the same way as in his "Atmospheres" for orchestra. The players articulated each of the ten sections superbly, vividly characterising the pieces' theatrical qualities, as if they were characters in a drama acting out episodes in a story. Kaija Saariaho's "Lichtbogen" was inspired by the composer's memory of seeing the Northern Lights, and featured a kaleidoscopic analysis of the composition and decomposition of instrumental and computerised tones, sounds oscillating and patterning in an interplay reminiscent of flickering and shifting light. In a strange way the "technological" genesis of the composer's preoccupations in this music suited the somewhat clinical and austere performing environment, as opposed to the Takemitsu piece with its delicate nature-world atmospheres, which took a long time to weave its usual spell.

The Stroma players and management must have been gratified by the enthusiastic response from the almost-full house to each individual item's performance, and to the group itself at the concert's end. Only a touch of awkwardness and inhibition regarding the group's overall presentation detracted slightly from the effect of the whole concert, the kind of thing which could have easily been dispelled by some spoken communication with the audience, such as a short introduction to each item (though, admittedly, the programme notes were excellent). Perhaps as the group gains more concert experience it'll develop a more relaxed and audience-friendly style. Purists will disagree, but in my view contemporary music needs all the help it can get in public, not in a way that cheapens or sensationalises concert experiences, but instead gives a more approachable aspect to a genre that many people instinctively choose to avoid, for whatever reason.

The second concert was the Frederic Rzewski recital, also in the Ilott Chamber, which featured works by Christian Wolff and Henri Pousseur, as well as two of the pianist's own compositions. Rather more reticent than one expected him to be when speaking about his work as a composer, Rzewski displayed similar no-nonsense qualities as a performer, a style whose lack of flamboyance and outward show highlighted the musical content of the pieces he played all the more strongly, as well as integrating the more unconventional means by which he produced sounds (clapping hands, slapping parts of his body, as well as other surfaces, clicking fingers, whistling, sighing, grunting, breathing agitatedly and orgasmically) into the musical argument with a minimum of fuss and self-consciousness. The Christian Wolff Piano Preludes (1981) are mostly severe, tightly-worked pieces with occasional forays into more resonant textures, some nightmarish tremolo sequences alternating with non-keyboard sounds such as slapping of wooden surfaces and whistling over an arpeggiated accompaniment. These and other disturbances put cats with pigeons, until the final prelude introduces the blessed relief of a cantabile line of sorts, one whose short-lived lyricism works up a punishing kind of processional that marches into a resonant distance created by a more reflective chordal close. The Henri Pousseur work "Les Litanies d'Icare" (1995) provided the contrast of a long-breathed and sonorous archway of accumulating melodic and rhythmic interest, from the Scriabinesque opening, through vistas of meditation containing both remembrance and foreboding, to a screwing up of emotion at the piece's climax, whose agitations were as dramatic as its abrubt ending.

Throughout the second half of the recital Rzewski's own music took our sensibilities over even vaster tracts of psychological and emotional territory, the first piece an abstractly-devised "novel for solo piano" known as "The Road" (a yet-to-be-completed saga of epic proportions, of which we heard "Mile 41" – out of a planned 64 all told!). It made a suitable foil for the gut-wrenching confessional desperations of the final work "De Profundis", described by the composer as a "melodramatic oratorio". Rzewski conceived "The Road" as a work that could be freely interpreted by its performer for her/his own pleasure, and without recourse to any concert or public recital conventions. Mile 41, here given its world premiere performance, is styled by the composer as a kind of lullaby, though the agitations of the music's middle section reminded one of Hamlet's remark about dreams disturbing even death's sleep. The implicit journeyings of this expansively-conceived music had its antithesis in the vortex-like progressions of the programme's final work "De Profundis". In this 30-minute work for solo piano the performer while playing recites eight sections of a text written in a letter from prison by Oscar Wilde to his young lover Lord Alfred Douglas, each part of which is preceded by an instrumental prelude. Words alone can't do full justice to the overall effect created by Rzewski throughout these sequences, during which the player has to convey, by means such as breathing heavily, sighing and groaning, as well as tapping, hitting and slapping his own body, head and face, not to mention the closed piano lid, all of an imprisoned person's anger, despair and bleak resignation. Going from the Rzewski recital to the following evening's concert by 175 East seemed like encountering chalk after cheese, for me a not altogether inapposite analogy when examining my responses to the music in each case. While admiring the craft and ingenuity of the works 175 East played, some things failed to engage my sensibilities below a certain cerebral level, or get beneath my skin and course along with the blood-flow, as some new music can do, leaving indelible marks throughout for future signposting. Of the pieces played I enjoyed Chris Cree Brown's Duo (1996) for its nature evocations and its aural theatricality placed at the service of a real sense of narrative, Dorothy Ker's subtly-etched "Water Mountain (1999)" with its dream-like ritualistic processionals and meditative stillnesses, Laurence Crane's essays in static tonality "See Our Lake (1999)", two movements of untroubled, hypnotic quiescence, and James Gardner's "some other plots for Babel (1999-2000)" whose volatile narrative impulse swept this listener through different and contradictory phases of a deconstructionist scenario. Of these, Gardner's work immediately struck me as being the most complex and substantial – right from the monolithic, subterranean aspect of the opening, the ideas throughout the piece seemed implicitly to join a quest towards coherence. Bursts of animation lead to flurries of confused impulses which gather and unite in a frenzied and grotesque dance, led by the solo violin. In response to the anarchy that follows, the violin intones a lament in tandem with a partner, suggesting perhaps a new beginning and a new direction of sorts, whose cyclical refocusing is no sooner established than the players cry enough and cease their sounds.

Of the other pieces, I thought and responded in far less focused terms, wanting to hear James Rolfe's "Before After (1992)", and Renee Coulombe' "Satori (2000)" again to make more sense of my notes – in the case of the Rolfe piece I scribbled things like "entropy? – a "dripping tap" sequence winding-down to still-life music (but punctuated by violent blasts)..." And Renee Coulombe's idea of "bringing consciousness to the instrument and player" was one I wanted more familiarity with via the piece played, to make sense of the fascinating incoherence of random detail which crowded into my ears. As with some of the music-making in the Stroma concert, I thought that occasionally a touch of theatricality (different lighting, less conventional seating arrangements for the musicians, or even a style of dress which took you away from the drab abstraction of the concert platform) might illuminate the music's ethos in a more positive way. Once again, I can imagine composers being alarmed by such ideas, and insisting upon the "pure presentation as sound of their work" without extraneous elements – but without resorting to cheap or crude effects I feel certain that some new music's aural innovations could be served positively by less traditional approaches to the concert format.

Apart from some explanation about a piece by James Saunders given by one of the 175 East performers at the beginning of their concert, the musicians throughout the three evenings hardly if ever spoke to their audiences, which I thought was a pity. Without going so far as turning concerts and recitals into lectures, I would be interested to hear performers speak about playing and interpreting new music, even if it was a process carried out in the manner of Debussy's Piano Preludes, with the composer's fanciful titles placed AFTER the music in the score. We're talking neither full-scale analyses nor dissertations here, but brief, helpful indications regarding the musicians' own views about and reactions to the music they're playing. Speaking to audiences, of course, wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, but I'd be surprised if any musician who took the time to learn and master some of the complexities of these new scores for performance DIDN'T have something to say which would interest listeners regarding what they were hearing.

An encouraging, if rather salutary, phenomenon I noticed regarding the three weekend concerts was that the audiences seemed to be composed mostly of young people (many, naturally enough, would have been friends and colleagues of the youthful players in Stroma and 175 East), a marked contrast to the noticeably older audiences who regularly attend NZSO concerts. It's interesting to reflect on how things will stand a generation down the track with these youthful audiences and their music. Perhaps some future Utopian confluence of positively-charged ions will preside over the acceptance of an amalgam of new and classic New Zealand music, established as part of a core repertoire for groups such as the NZSO and the NZCO, whose relevance to the cultural life of this country will thus increase a hundredfold. Organisations like orchestras, for reasons of their own, also need to keep in touch with a wide range of people, and be receptive to new things, despite the prevailing climate of market-led attitudes regarding the arts as a commodity and requiring them to "pay their way". But it's all symbiotic in the long run, with musicians in groups like Stroma relying upon orchestral jobs for a livelihood, and orchestras needing home-grown music as a kind of operational identity, being work that the musicians know they play better than anybody else.

A resounding success, all told, then, the "Sonic Broom" weekend, and a concept for which more than one speaker expressed approval, along with suggestions for further such meetings. And, if Frederic Rzewski was right, and composers occasionally need to talk with one another and with other people whose business and/or pleasure is their music, to keep their work in touch with the rest of humanity, then let such meetings become a regular part of the fabric of music and its advancement for all of us in these islands of ours.