While new creative collectives keep multiplying in the field of contemporary academic music, often assuming, like any young creature, that history began with them, we turn to the long everyday life of the principal ensembles specialising in the performance of 20th- and 21st-century works. Both ensembles have been active for more than thirty years: MASM and the Studio for New Music, which, as it seems to us, follow diametrically opposite paths. Anton Dubin (AD) talked to Victoria Korshunova (VK), director of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Evgenia Izotova (EI), executive director of the Studio for New Music, asking both interlocutors about the advantages and pointing out, from his own perspective, the drawbacks of each of the ensemble models they have chosen.