UnTwelve 2009 composition competition

Hello all,

I'd like to announce UnTwelve's first annual composition competition!

There will be a $200 cash prize for your winning 3-5 minute electronic,
acoustic, or electro-acoustic piece, entries are due by Oct. 1st, and you
can find out all the rules and regulations by checking out our webpage for
the event:

http://www.untwelve.org/competition.html

On behalf of UnTwelve, I can say we look forward to seeing your
contributions!

Best,

Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org

I have written quite a bit about composition competitions on my blog. I have learned, through the ensuing discussion that competitions and the institutional structure around many of them, continues to have an overweighted role in some corners of our profession (a large portion of the response has either been via email, rather than public comments on the blog, showing some fear of being identified as "rocking the boat"). I am long-since past the age in which I have any interest in entering competitions (for the record, I entered three local competitions while in High School), so I have no personal interest in the question, but I do think discussing it is an ethical matter out of concern for the new music community as a whole. The comments below may not all apply to the particular competition discussed in this thread, and, indeed, I wish the organizers well, for a competition focused on "UnTwelve" works could be a very good thing, but I must encourage the organizers to fund the competition properly so that no entry fees are required.

There are legitimate competitions and they can and should play a limited role in the musical community. However, there are a very large number of competitions and festivals in which entry fees for submitted compositions are essentially being used to fund the award and other costs of the competition. Any organizer who needs to use entry fees to fund a prize has not done the necessary fund-raising and should not be in the business of staging competitions. Composers are often at the bottom end of the music-funding food chain, and this practice can often be yet another example of music administrators abusing the relatively weak position of composers. (It is also not unusual now for administrators, recording firms, or broadcasters to insist that the composer play the license fees themselves or the works will not be programmed!) Some competition organizers argue that an entry fee necessary to "sort out" unserious entries. The appropriate instrument for doing this is not an entry fee, it is in clear competition specifications. While there may well be adminstrative costs to a competition, any organizer who needs to use entry fees to cover these costs has not done the third-party fund raising necessary to organize the competition and should not be in the business of staging competitions.

To my younger composer colleagues: the decision to enter a competition is you own, and while there may well be considerable institutional pressure to enter competitions and to list prizes on your resume, please consider:

— the fact that there are important legitimate composition competitions that do not have entry fees,
— the possibility that there are competitions which do use their fees to fund the prizes (a rule of thumb is that every competition can expect 20 entries, so anything less than a 20:1 relationship between the prize money and entry fees is unacceptable)

and, finally, consider the possibility that competitions, in general, are not an appropriate instrument for determining musical quality.

Dr. Daniel Wolf
Composer
Frankfurt

Hello Aaron Johnson,

Nice initiative, but I join my voice to Daniel Wolf : why asking 20 $ to be part of this competition ?
All composers pay already with their time, talent, instruments, software, internet charges etc.,
and the risk you take is to dissuade less fortunate musicians...
Could you not manage your own expenses otherwise, through the CD sales for example ?
Just to share my personnal experience about it, I organized several microtonal music programmations based on calls myself, and I found that the participation response can be somehow very unpredictable (but also it was done in France, where microtonal music are nearly unknown). Anyway I would think entry fees would only add to the difficulty of having the chance to offer a representative panel of microtonal music.
I also had fun in participating in several competitions and wether I got selected or not, I was glad all of them were free.

Good luck anyhow, inform us of the issue !
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Jacques

Well it's obviously done to raise money for untwelve organisation.Which is a
non profit organisation.
10 people get selected = 10 times $20 = 200 dollar
These 10 people get to sort out / vote which one of these gets the $200.
All people above 10 entering are donating to untwelve.
If 30 people enter it's a $400 profit / donation to untwelve.
+ the money raised from cd sales. (it doesn't say limited to which amount,
and for which price. please tell)

I myself would have liked it better too if for instance there was either no
entry fee and untwelve tries to get the money from cd sales or a donator (I
mean what better way to spend organisation money than to promote making
music and paying musicians).
Or better yet if all the money from all participants goes to the winner.
So if 30 people enter, the winner gets $600.

Aaron Johnson wrote:

> and you can find out all the rules and regulations by checking out our webpage
> for the event: http://www.untwelve.org/competition.html

After reading the webpage, I have to admit that I could get almost all the necessary things except that I know next to nothing about Paypal, let alone if it's usable in the Czech Republic at all.

Petr

Dear Aaron,

Thank you for arranging this competition (and congratulations to the
UnTwelve festival in general).

Concerning fees and price money, if I may put my two pennies worth, I
suggest you may consider dropping both the fee and the price money.
The competition is then about the honour of being among the ten
finalists, and being the winner of course.

Best
Torsten

--
Torsten Anders
Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research
University of Plymouth
Office: +44-1752-586219
Private: +44-1752-558917
http://strasheela.sourceforge.net
http://www.torsten-anders.de

On Jul 14, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Daniel Wolf wrote:
> I have written quite a bit about composition competitions on my
> blog. I
> have learned, through the ensuing discussion that competitions and the
> institutional structure around many of them, continues to have an
> overweighted role in some corners of our profession (a large
> portion of
> the response has either been via email, rather than public comments
> on the
> blog, showing some fear of being identified as "rocking the boat").
> I am
> long-since past the age in which I have any interest in entering
> competitions (for the record, I entered three local competitions
> while in
> High School), so I have no personal interest in the question, but I do
> think discussing it is an ethical matter out of concern for the new
> music
> community as a whole. The comments below may not all apply to the
> particular competition discussed in this thread, and, indeed, I
> wish the
> organizers well, for a competition focused on "UnTwelve" works
> could be a
> very good thing, but I must encourage the organizers to fund the
> competition properly so that no entry fees are required.
>
> There are legitimate competitions and they can and should play a
> limited
> role in the musical community. However, there are a very large
> number of
> competitions and festivals in which entry fees for submitted
> compositions
> are essentially being used to fund the award and other costs of the
> competition. Any organizer who needs to use entry fees to fund a prize
> has not done the necessary fund-raising and should not be in the
> business
> of staging competitions. Composers are often at the bottom end of the
> music-funding food chain, and this practice can often be yet another
> example of music administrators abusing the relatively weak
> position of
> composers. (It is also not unusual now for administrators, recording
> firms, or broadcasters to insist that the composer play the license
> fees
> themselves or the works will not be programmed!) Some competition
> organizers argue that an entry fee necessary to "sort out" unserious
> entries. The appropriate instrument for doing this is not an entry
> fee,
> it is in clear competition specifications. While there may well be
> adminstrative costs to a competition, any organizer who needs to
> use entry
> fees to cover these costs has not done the third-party fund raising
> necessary to organize the competition and should not be in the
> business of
> staging competitions.
>
> To my younger composer colleagues: the decision to enter a
> competition is
> you own, and while there may well be considerable institutional
> pressure
> to enter competitions and to list prizes on your resume, please
> consider:
>
> — the fact that there are important legitimate composition
> competitions
> that do not have entry fees,
> — the possibility that there are competitions which do use their
> fees to
> fund the prizes (a rule of thumb is that every competition can
> expect 20
> entries, so anything less than a 20:1 relationship between the
> prize money
> and entry fees is unacceptable)
>
> and, finally, consider the possibility that competitions, in
> general, are
> not an appropriate instrument for determining musical quality.
>
> Dr. Daniel Wolf
> Composer
> Frankfurt

Hi all,

Thanks for your feedback re:the competition.

There are valid points on both sides of the issue regarding entry fees.
However, ultimately, our position is one that we all are comfortable with as
it stands.

We feel strongly that the competition will be a net positive for the music
community in general, but it was started out of fondness for this community.
Our hope was to spark some creative activity, giving people some incentive
to give their best work for the benefit of microtonal music awareness
everywhere.

We have received numerous queries already from excited parties outside the
tuning list, so our mission of expanding such awareness has already begun,
and as such, we consider this a successful project already. While we
sincerely hope that some of you will contribute your works, and we look
forward to listening to them, we understand if you choose not to.

Best,

Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org

This article is worth reading:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=3360

some excerpts:

"At the BMI Foundation, we wouldn't launch [a competition] until we had enough money to make it happen. It doesn't make sense to do it otherwise," says Ralph Jackson, president of the BMI Foundation, assistant vice president of Classical Music Relations, and director of the BMI Student Composer Awards. "My feeling about it is that if you're going to run some sort of competition for composers, that if you don't have enough money to pay for the cost to run it and to give the prize, you shouldn't give it."

"(The American Music Center's) Opportunity Update carries the note that the organization "does not encourage the charging of entry fees" and that it "strongly objects to organizations that charge fees in a manner that is misleading or inappropriate, such as charging relatively high entry fees in order to fund the cost of the actual award or performance or, worse, charging entry fees while reserving the right not to award any prize at all."

No matter how much goodwill is intended by the organizers, a $20 entry fee for a competition with a $200 prize is not acceptable and I would discourage my younger colleagues from taking part.

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt

You know.... I didn't catch there was an entry fee.

Considering I'm unemployed right now - I'll have to see what my situation is
in September.

I can understand such a fee if it goes to producing the CD album. That is
not a cheap process.

However, perhaps one can produce a web album on a service like Jamendo.

Chris

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 4:14 PM, djwolf_frankfurt <djwolf@...> wrote:

>
>
> This article is worth reading:
>
> http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=3360
>
> some excerpts:
>
> "At the BMI Foundation, we wouldn't launch [a competition] until we had
> enough money to make it happen. It doesn't make sense to do it otherwise,"
> says Ralph Jackson, president of the BMI Foundation, assistant vice
> president of Classical Music Relations, and director of the BMI Student
> Composer Awards. "My feeling about it is that if you're going to run some
> sort of competition for composers, that if you don't have enough money to
> pay for the cost to run it and to give the prize, you shouldn't give it."
>
> "(The American Music Center's) Opportunity Update carries the note that the
> organization "does not encourage the charging of entry fees" and that it
> "strongly objects to organizations that charge fees in a manner that is
> misleading or inappropriate, such as charging relatively high entry fees in
> order to fund the cost of the actual award or performance or, worse,
> charging entry fees while reserving the right not to award any prize at
> all."
>
> No matter how much goodwill is intended by the organizers, a $20 entry fee
> for a competition with a $200 prize is not acceptable and I would discourage
> my younger colleagues from taking part.
>
> Daniel Wolf
> Frankfurt
>
>
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "djwolf_frankfurt" <djwolf@...> wrote:
>
> No matter how much goodwill is intended by the organizers, a $20 entry fee for a competition with a $200 prize is not acceptable and I would discourage my younger colleagues from taking part.
>
> Daniel Wolf
> Frankfurt

Hmmm, would not eliminating a significant number of your younger colleagues from the competition give an unfair advantage to your older colleagues? ;-)

--George