Looking back at the seminars on Contemporary Choral Music which I've attended at the Cork International choral Festival over the years, I'm struck by how contained and uncontentious the event has become. Five or 10 years ago, there was fair chance that the seminar would spark a heated row about composers' unreasonable demands on singers or a verbal lashing of young composers for technical presentation of their scores. The experiments of earlier years, which includes visits by the BBC Singers and conducting master classes as well as the focus on the young, have been exchanged this year for a clearer, more predictable formula. In three separate sessions, each of the commissioned works is performed, analysed, performed again, and discussed with the composer; questions are then invited, and the piece is performed a third time. The commissioned pieces are short, around five minutes, and the seminars about them run to around an hour-and-a-half.The three carols by British composer Peter Dickinson which opened this year's seminar spike the expected seasonal spirit with some unusual texts, additions to the bluesy treatment of Christmas is coming by Bernarr Rainbow, and the self-explanatory O Christmas Time, O Hateful Time by Lord Berners, for which Dickinson has woven tightly-knit, contrapuntal background patterns from God rest you merry, Gentlemen.UCC's Professor of Music, David Harold Cox, who provides the analyses, announced that Dickinson's carols were sort of pieces which "Don't really need the services if a music analyst" - and then proceeded to provide what he had just declared redundant.Cox's analytic treatments take a narrow focus, treading paths of meagre illumination which don't always coincide with the journeys the composers describe themselves as having set out to make. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but Cox's approach to Belgian composer Vic Nees's Babel seemed dubious from the start, as he evaded the issue of why a man setting out (as Cox was proposing) to work with intervals of a minor third would have notate (as Ness did) augmented seconds. Assuming the Nees was not expecting singers to replicate the equal; temperament of the modern keyboard, it would have been interesting to know exactly what acoustic interval he expected to hear in his compact, word-responsive setting of texts from Genesis.The third composer, Cork's own Patrick Zuk, came closest to generating controversy as he inveighed against large tracts of this century's more challenging music. Beyond that, he damned Richard Strauss for eschewing effective climaxes through "wasteful" high-lying vocal lines. His own An Das Angesicht des Herrn Jesu is an essay in finely-crafted but date-sounding expressionism.