Milton Court’s new concert hall is a mighty small space, but the BBC Singers under their chief conductor David Hill were determined to launch their residency there with a musical epic of world events from Genesis to the post-nuclear era. And they carried it off triumphantly, if with some ear-singeing resonances, in American works from the last 66 years ringing with bright tonalities. The real surprise was to find Nevadan choral guru Eric Whitacre reaching for the stars as confidently, if not as consistently, as Steve Reich in his 1984 masterpiece The Desert Music.

In 1980, an orchestra and conductor then hardly known in Britain came to the Royal Festival Hall. I went to hear Elisabeth Söderström in Strauss’s Four Last Songs; I left stunned by an unorthodox Sibelius Second Symphony and above all by one of the encores, Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten by one Arvo Pärt.

Imagine the rising and falling piano cadences of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then plug the gaps between each note with any of those which may have been encountered on the path to the next. Once that’s done, ensure that the playing is constant with each note bleeding into the next. Mesh the result with a similar composition played at the same time and you have some idea of how Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Windmills”, his final piece last night, sounds.

"Avoid missing ball for high score" ‑ possibly some of the most famous and minimal videogame instructions ever, for one of the earliest arcade games, Pong. The instructions for Impossible Road could probably be similarly distilled to such haiku levels of minimalism: "don't let the ball stray too far from the track," perhaps.

What a different country the past is. When one thinks of all the famous art works that caused an outrage when they were first unveiled and yet we now admire as ground-breaking and consider “seminal”. It’s probably everything that ever caused a critic of the old guard to sneer and that much maligned member of the unsuspecting public to have a fainting fit. One may go back at least as far as the last 150 years – it’s the 150^th anniversary of Manet’s Olympia, after all – and to the wellsprings of modernism.  

Bruce Nauman is a great synthesizer of art forms, melding the language games of conceptual art with the physicality of post-minimalist sculpture and performance art. Where the minimalists duplicated the serial and repetitive industrial world around them, Nauman’s use of repetition and order have a linguistic basis. Inculcation, jokes, paradoxes and puns form the logic of much of Nauman’s work and these games grew out of his choreographed minimalist performances. Given this trajectory, the psychoanalytical angle taken in this exhibtion feels grafted on.

Santa has returned home, but he wasn’t the season’s only visitor from the Nordic lands. The crop of recent music in from the region embraces genre-crossing jazz, vintage-style rock, the expected electropop, cross-border collaborations and a seven-year-old Finn. Exploring all corners of Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk journeys where no one else does, landing in Norway first for some finely formed jazz.

Joe Muggs writes: “KanZeOn is one of my favourite films – not just music films, but in any genre – of the past year. Not quite documentary, not quite art film, not quite music video, it's a slow, abstract audiovisual love poem to Japan and its relationship to sound and music.

Although he has been recording since 2005, it was his 2011 album, Felt, which set Nils Frahm apart from the ever-swelling tide of modern classical minimalists. It was so intimate, so subtle, it felt almost like it shouldn’t be shared. The follow up has that same sense of peeking in on some private act, but it feels less uncomfortably illicit. On Screws, Frahm’s piano is naked, with nothing intruding.

“If shit were music, you’d be a brass band”. Bish Bosch is no easy ride and that lyric, from its 22-minute centrepiece “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", is typically abstruse, emblematically challenging. Although the album has clear themes and becomes less impenetrable the more it is lived with, it’s never going to achieve the cosy familiarity that future cult items so often exude on early passes. If anything, Bish Bosch is an anti-cult album, one that seeks to jar, disorient and remain inscrutable.