Composers*: We are taking submissions for our 54th Annual ‘Pyramidová Hra’ Composition Competition. Compositions must be written for the livenka accordion (please see attached YouTube video for history and instrumental techniques and familiarise yourself with the left hand lever system if you are not already aware) and any combination of the following: tin whistle, shō, Wagner tuba, pianola, acoustic guitar (DADGAD tuning only) and the tenor jaw harp. The piece should be of a duration between 13-14 minutes . Some form of prerecorded tape (Dictabelt, Minifon P55 or similar) must also be used in the work. The compositions will be judged by Professor G. Aitkeper PhD, and results will be announced in October 2025. The winning composition will receive a prize of $150 and a performance by Pyramidová Hra on their YouTube channel, plus possible inclusion in their concert repertoire. The selected composer will be expected to attend the premiere and present a short introduction to their work. Regrettably, travel expenses cannot be covered.
Entry fee: $55 per composition. Deadline: 14th September 2024.
*(Eligible composers must be aged between 18 and [YOUR AGE MINUS 1], must have been born in the United States and currently be residing there. Eligible pieces must have never been performed in public or previously recorded.)
When I was but a lad studying music at university, one of my hobbies for a rainy day was browsing a website simply called “Composers’ Site”. It’s a directory of composing competitions, calls for scores, residencies and other composing opportunities. Although the above competition is obviously a parody constructed for the purposes of this blog, you would be amazed at its resemblance to many actual competitions that ensembles around the world post on ‘Composers’ Site’.
The deadlines for some of these competitions are so tight, the instrumental combinations so obscure and the entry fees often so high that I genuinely wonder how many submissions these competitions actually receive. I would often try and listen to the works of previous winners to see whether my style was at all suitable (it was, more often than not, not), though recordings were rarely available to actually hear and were often buried in the memories of a handful of concertgoers.
How many of these competitions did I enter? Two. For both submissions I received an ‘honourable mention’ and, in one case, a 3D printed model of the unusual instrument I was composing for (which was pretty cool, I guess). But my hard drive is littered with countless other abandoned contest entries. There’s the one that was constructed entirely around a polka rhythm where it was down to your own perception whether it was the bass drum or the snare that was the ‘downbeat’. There’s the solo shakuhachi piece that I abandoned when it drifted into pastiche halfway through bar 4. Files I can no longer open on my computer with stupid working titles like ‘The Young Snape’, ‘Oh Dog’ and ‘Sad ‘un’.
How often do composers have the motivation to complete an entire speculative submission they have to pay to send? If you’ve got actual commissions on the go, you’re hardly going to prioritise the contest, are you?
I am sure that if you’re a musical director for an unusual ensemble of instruments, getting repertoire for your players is no easy feat. A competition presumably helps to drum up attention, perhaps some local arts funding, clout for the ensemble and clicks on their website. But I wonder if a large proportion of the ensembles wouldn’t be better off directly approaching specific composers whose work they admire and whose style they feel would resonate with their existing audiences? Most composers love being commissioned and many would probably do it for less than the prize money the ensemble offered.
But do you sacrifice the meritocratic element? Sure, a competition might enable a completely unknown and previously uncommissioned composer to blast through the contest (particularly if very few other people have entered) and win the top prize, get performed and be able to add ‘prize-winning’ to their biography. Without the infrastructure to support them properly, though – marketing their work, recommending them to other ensembles and musicians, paying for them to travel out to the premiere and so on- these single, isolated victories will not give that emerging composer any sort of lasting career trajectory. The number of competitions they’d have to win a year to generate a liveable income… I can’t even be bothered to calculate it.
The concluding point of this article could be, you might expect: ‘composers, don’t enter these competitions! They’re taking advantage of you!’, but that probably doesn’t need stating. Most composers with limited reserves of time and money will probably just bow out upon reading the contest description or seeing the exorbitant entry fee. (That’s what I’ve been doing since my student days, anyway.) There are a lot of competitions out there that are pretty unfair on composers and do take advantage of their desperation to get recognition and success.
To avoid ending this article on a cantankerous note, I do think that there are ‘good’ competitions out there and that even most of the more nefarious seeming ones are still probably put together in good faith, or something approaching good faith. Some, like the Takemitsu Prize, have some pretty decent prize money. Maybe, though, there’s something more fundamental underlying the problem, however ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the competition is. Why are composers encouraged to compete in the first place with something so subjective, so personal and so unquantifiable as music?