Commission statement

Classical Music
17/7/10

From the initial stages of finding a composer to the playing of a new work, the process of commisioning takes time and trust. But the end result can be both rewarding and inspiring. Simon Taitreports from the recent Orchestras Live gathering

The questions are quite simple: why do we, on one hand, write orchestral music, and why do we, on the other, pay composers to do it?

The answers are not that simple, as a packed St Pancras Room at King’s Place discovered when, for their annual conferene, Orchestras Live gathered the composers, the promoters, the musicians, the publishers, the venue managers, the conductors and the organisers of festivals and orchestras. Orchestras Live, said its chief executive, Henry Little, a third of whose programming is based on commissioned new work, would be the ‘expert broker’.

So, how, he asked, does this ‘living, breathing art form for all of us’ actually happen?

‘Love (of making music),’said Alec Roth, ‘and the need to feel useful’. The response is not as glib and simplistic as it looks. Roth, a composer who works a lot with schools, chorale and small ensembles, illustrated his point with an anecdote of a conversation with a poet friend who had been commissioned to put some words to a piece of music. Roth asked him what it was for: an anniversary of a chamber ensemble in a private house, not a large event, his friend replied. ‘”No, what is it for – soprano, piano, are there strings?” And I thought, how narrow minded we are, when the “what’s it for” question is the most important, and it’s for different things for the different elements involved.

‘It’s not an isolated process, it’s collaborative with all the different elements involved in making the music.’

In the commissioning of a lot of new music there is a high element of trust, not in the composer so much as in the audience because it can take years for new work to be widely appreciated. ‘There’s a need to keep the repertoire moving,’ said Andrew Burke chief executive of the London Sinfonietta. ‘New work that was witnessed a few years ago as challenging now has made its way into the repertoire, and you can look at a pattern of work among orchestras now where it’s become a badge of honour to be engaged in new work. It’s constantly fascinating to be addressing new artforms and discovering something new, and the question is how to make that work for an audience.’

But if you’re looking for a composer, where do you look? For Burke and his ensemble it’s a matter of keeping an ear to ground, maintaining contacts with those who can spot some of the promising young ones, ‘and you keep awake about it’. But it can be a long process, of making oneself available to read and hear work, to engineer meetings between composers and ensembles before a commission is in the air, and it can take years. ‘Sometimes you hear something on the radio that hits you in the stomach – for me it was Tavener’s The Protecting Veil – and you know you have to have something by that composer; in this case it took 20 years’.

And it’s a matter of trust, said Nick Collon, conductor of the Aurora chamber orchestra. They were already in the room’s good books having started the day off with their first performance of part of a delightful wordless opera commissioned from Julian Philips, head of composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Collon swears by the perspicacity and generosity of music publishers after a visit to the Boosey & Hawkes library where the librarian told him to choose whatever he wanted and the scores would be sent on. ‘I took about 40, and from that point I’ve submerged myself in publishers’ offices and found a lot of new music I wouldn’t have otherwise found’.

But that’s finding by browsing. How do you identify your Julian Phillips when you don’t know who he is? Context is the key for him. ‘Who’s it for, what’s it for, and when you know, find young composers in your own area, and talk to the music colleges,’ he advises. ‘In the current climate when there’s very little money to go around, to commission cold is not a good idea. It’s about building, and you need to take time to develop relationships, however they might emerge’.

And, said the oboist and conductor Nick Daniel who had commissioned a lot of work both as a soloist and for ensembles, be prepared to make partnerships: for him, working with Arts Council East, for instance, has been ‘wonderful’. And, of course, talk to the Society for the Promotion of New Music.

But once the composer is found, the commission made, how does the music happen? ‘It comes from all these relationships, and it’s only in retrospect that you realise where all these ideas have come from,’ said Roth.

The best commissions, he said, come from unexpected places, a bar or a restaurant, but can a composer actually be told what to write? Well, writing to text can be like that, Phillips said: ‘I’ll never do it again. The danger is that you an never look in the mirror and ask yourself “what am I doing this for”. You need a commissioner to not burden you with too many agendas and leave you free with your imagination’.

What is important though, said Ian Ritchie, director of the City of London Festival, is that a composer can work with the orchestra in the process of making a work, as with the ground-breaking Panufnik scheme in which the LSO works with young composers. ‘Composers who are established perhaps get insufficient opportunities to do this,’ he said, and Roth mourned a loss of the tradition in which musicians got involved in the creative process.

For the commissioner, finding the artist to make your work and having the final score plop onto your doormat was just the start of the process. More extensive touring gives opportunities for new work to be played more than once – ‘one night stands do you no good’, warned Daniel. ‘But,’ said Andrew Burke, ‘it has to be afforded, where do I put it in the programme, what do I put around it?’

But that is part of the mechanics of bringing new work to audiences. ‘Commissioning is the best thing in the world, to be able to say to a composer I’d like you to write something for me,’ he said. ‘Almost as exciting is to be able to say to a composer, ‘Whatever you want to do, do it and we’ll be your partner’.