Arrived a day too late, I'm afraid, to hear Dror Feiler's Music is Castrated Noise. But over the final weekend the festival showed that music was many other things as well. Violins screaming. Constipated musical boxes. A choir imitating dripping water. Plus Julianne Moore's mouth in close-up in a film of Beckett's theatre text Not I.

In 32 hours 12 world premieres trotted past. Yet none of these new brooms could sweep away the works by old-stagers. After a testing hour with Anton Lukoszevieze's cello embedded in laptop electronics (most rewardingly in Matthew Adkins's between lines), what relief to find a cello, and piano, standing naked in Bernd Aloïs Zimmermann's Intercommunicazione, a sturdy, 40-year-old battle piece, firmly dispatched by Arne Deforce and Yutaka Oya. Zimmermann's forthright skills might have helped to shore up Richard Barrett's epic festival commission Nacht und Träume, pretentious yet wispy. Schubert was quoted, but Barrett isn't Schubert.

Stockhausen also had a good festival. Litanie 97 - declaimed, red-robed, in a circle - concluded the New London Chamber Choir's fearless concert with a ritual of unique perversity. The ears popped even more with the UK premiere of Hope, for string trio, ninth of the 24 planned segments in the composer's unfinished Klang cycle. Inside a tonal framework, gnomic motifs were worried to death: what was this, melted Max Reger? Strange perhaps to find Stockhausen the galactic voyager travelling a century back in Germany's music. Yet why not? The players of musicFabrik certainly made the piece affecting and cogent: 35 minutes sped by just like that.

Minutes zipped even faster in their terrific accounts with saxophonist Frank Gratkowski of two free-jazz effusions by Sun Ra, another visitor from musical outer space. The sweetest bedlam this side of heaven, Sun Ra's pieces were the weekend's highlight. They certainly knocked into the ground Philip Thomas's well-executed John Cage conspectus: four interesting hours crowned by the passive mosaic of Concert for Piano and Orchestra. As usual Cage cleaned the ears nicely, but compared with Sun Ra the music did seem - what's the phrase, castrated noise?

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010