The British Clavichord Society Awards for Clavichord Composition 2004
We are delighted to record the winners of the first British Clavichord Society Awards for Clavichord Composition.
First prize (£600): Gary Carpenter of West Kirby, Wirral, UK, for Van Assendelft‘s Vermeer. Now shortlisted for a 2005 British Composer Award.
The first performance was given by Pamela Nash in Edinburgh on 29 August 2004, and the piece has since been performed by Paul Simmonds at the International Clavichord Symposium, Magnano, Italy (September 2005).
Click here for more details on Gary Carpenter and Van Assendelft‘s Vermeer; to buy a signed copy of the score, click here.
Second prize (£300): Philippe Emmanuel Forget of Chalon-sur-Saône, France, for Little Suite for Clavichord.
Third prize (£100): Graham Lynch of Penzance, Cornwall, UK, for Admiring Yoro Waterfall. The first performance was given on 29 August 2004 by Paul Simmonds, who has since performed the piece in Lewes (March 2005, using an eighteenth-century pantalon clavichord), near Ashburton (April 2005, for the British Clavichord Society and the Totnes Early Music Society), and in Magnano, Italy (September 2005, at an International Clavichord Symposium under the auspices of one of the competition‘s sponsors, Musica Antica a Magnano, the International Centre for Clavichord Studies).
To buy a signed copy of the score, click here.
Fourth prize (£50): Julia Usher of Colchester, Essex, UK, for Clavicle.
Fifth prize (£50): Geoffrey Allan Taylor of Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes, UK, for Pages from Homer. The first performance was given by Joel Speerstra on 29 August 2004. To buy a signed copy of the score (and a new two-keyboard version of the piece), click here.
Click here for more details of the winning composers and their scores.
Awards were presented at a Celebration of New Music for the Clavichord on Sunday, 29 August 2004, at St Cecilia‘s Hall, Edinburgh, when three of the winning compositions were performed in full and the others were presented with extracts.
About the BCS Awards for Clavichord Composition 2004
The purpose of this competition (which we believe to be a world-first) was to encourage the writing of 21st-century music for the clavichord. Entries were judged for their musical quality and invention and for demonstrating the composer‘s appreciation of the clavichord‘s limitations and an idiomatic use of its strengths. The competition was open to all; entrants were invited to submit an original solo composition for the clavichord, provided only that it was their own work and had not been published elsewhere. Compositions were required to last no longer than eight minutes, and to be playable on a clavichord of the traditional type (maximum compass five octaves, FF-f 3) by one player using only the keyboard.
Entries were submitted in score and were evaluated anonymously by a panel of professional musicians chaired by Paul Simmonds and including John Cranmer and Anthony Payne.
Composing for the clavichord: a short guide
Our short guide to composing for the clavichord, written for competitors by Francis Knights, is still available: click here, or write or e-mail to Paula Woods (BCS), 137 White Friars Lane, St Judes, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 9RA.
November 2004/June 2005/November 2005