Composer Auditions: Part 1 – Why?

| Sep 29, 2015 |

The American composer Stanley Friedman recently posted an idea on Facebook that I thought was brilliant: Orchestras spend time and money holding auditions for musicians; why not hold auditions for composers? Though the idea isn’t mine, I’d like to explore it and elaborate on it.

To provide some context, orchestras today often program new compositions that orchestra members don’t want to play and audience members don’t want to hear. Decisions regarding new music seem to be top-down, and orchestra members have little or no say in how those decisions are made. Most frequently, the new music is chosen by the music director/conductor, an artistic administrator, or a composer-in-residence. As a result, orchestra members often are resentful of the modern music they have to play. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in music—that if the audience doesn’t like a piece, quite often the orchestra feels the same way.

But it’s not just the musicians and audience who suffer; think about the composers. There are a great many talented composers working today who simply don’t have a chance to get their works heard. The librarian of a major orchestra once told me that the music director of the orchestra received about twenty-five new scores to look at per week, and those packages went directly into the trash, unopened. The fact is that unless the composer has a personal connection with a conductor or a major publisher, the chance of getting a piece played or even considered is very slight.

So, the current process for choosing new music bypasses the musicians and the audience, and it benefits a relatively small group of composers who land most of the commissions. The system is broken and needs to be fixed.

Why does the selection of new music still belong to a system that is outdated? What can we do to change a system that penalizes audiences, orchestra members, and composers? I’ll look at these important questions in Parts 2 and 3 of this blog post, in which I’ll suggest some ways to improve the process of programming new works for orchestra.