O/Modernt is delighted to announce its annual Composition Award (2023), staged in collaboration with Festival Internacional de Música de Marvão (Portugal), Rusk Chamber Music in Jakobstad (Finland) and Fondazione Entroterre (Italy). The winning composition will be awarded €4,000 and will be premiered in 2023 in Sweden, and in Portugal, Italy and Finland in 2023/2024.
In a celebrated call to arms, Schumann singled out Brahms as a young composer who was capable of opening up New Paths in nineteenth-century music. Brahms rose to the challenge by doing something that we continuously strive to do at O/Modernt. He reinvented the past. Drawing on his fascination for early music, he reconfigured traditional materials, incorporating them into expressively powerful new wholes that are suffused with personal feeling and contemporary urgency.
O/Modernt invites submissions for our 2023 Composition Award that invoke the spirit of Brahms by looking backwards and forwards, to the past and to the future. The theme can be freely interpreted to reflect the composer’s own interests and concerns.
Applicants are required to submit a 8-12 minutes piece composed for two or three string instruments (violin, violoncello, viola) and piano (no electronics).
Entrants must also submit the following attachments:
Scores will be adjudicated by an international jury, chaired by Jill Jarman, and to include Ondřej Adámek, Alasdair Beatson, Nicola Campogrande, Sebastian Fagerlund, Matthew Peterson, Vicky Sayles, Raminta Šerkšnytė and Benjamin Staern.
The application fee of 35 EUR is payable online via the secure payment method on MUVAC. The application fee is non-refundable, except in the unlikely event that the Competition does not take place.
Please, read the full COMPETITION RULES in the file attached.
Candidates are required to write a short bio on application for use in programs or booklets, 1000 characters maximum.
A short biography (c.1000 characters).
A short description of the Composition and the idea behind it in accordance with the competition brief.
(c.1000 characters)
Piece duration
(Maximum duration: between 8 and 12 minutes.)
Do you confirm that the submitted Composition have never been published, recorded (unless for archive/study purposes) or performed in public, with the exception of student performance(s) at an educational institution?
(Details of any such performance(s) must be included in the next question) *
* Details of any publication, recording (unless for archive/study purposes) or performance in public of the submitted Composition.
Declaration of authorship
I declare that the score submitted is my own exclusive property and is freely at my disposal. I have not adapted, arranged or used any third-party copyright music in any way whatsoever for the purposes of the score and my composition.
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Audio files are required (details below). No live audition.
A sound file of the Composition uploaded via Soundcloud (preferably a live recording, but midi files will be accepted; a professional recording is not required). IMPORTANT: the sound file must be anonymous, and there should be no information that might help to identify the applicant. We advise to set up a new Soundcloud account with a suitable nickname or rename temporarily your existing account (and remove/hide all relevant information) solely for the purpose of the application. Please do get in touch with us if you have any difficulties with your file.