Project Encore: Choral Works Awaiting Second Performances
- March 16, 2010
- By Michael Kaulkin
- Choral Music, Past Work
- 0 comments
Last year the New York chorus Schola Cantorum on Hudson initiated their Project Encore initiative, an effort to promote second performances of choral works that have received premiere performances and nothing since. It is a great and much needed idea: a juried central repository complete with instrumentation, text, program notes and even audio excerpts that choral decision makers can resort to for new works to consider.
Project Encore addresses a very real problem that faces composers, even successful ones, of all genres of music: Performers and organizations can generate a lot of energy and marketing hay by commissioning new works, but there’s little to motivate them to see that these new works have a future. Conductors are hounded from every direction by publishers and composers (guilty!) looking for second performances, but they usually have an idea or a particular need to fill, so where do they go to sort through all that and find what will suit their immediate goals?
There is an article on the Vocal Area Network, a web site serving the New York area choral community, that elaborates on this problem and describes more thoroughly how Project Encore aims to mitigate it. Read the article here.
Disclosure: I’m honored to say that my own Cycle of Friends (1996) for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra was chosen to be among the works included in the Project Encore database. It was commissioned and premiered in 1996 and still awaits its future.
