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A case study of new music I've been involved in premiering in the last two years, and how those composers got it done: 1. Just helped a composer record the premiere of his new oratorio. He paid for about 50 orchestra members, at union rates. VERY EXPENSIVE. He paid for singers to do the solos. He paid a conductor to conduct them all. A sound engineer to do the recording. A rehearsal pianist to work with the choir for two rehearsals. A production guy to get all these various people organized. He paid to rent the recording space. He will pay to have the recordings digitally edited and copies made. He is a singer himself, so he was able to get enough singing friends to volunteer to be the chorus, but that means it was a small chorus, there were only a few rehearsals, and we weren't a well-balanced group. Since we were all volunteering, he couldn't push us too hard to practice, or turn away any extra singers who weren't well-prepared. That may hurt the quality of the final recording. All of this will have cost him, maybe $100,000 to get a demo CD that he can take out into the world and say, "See, this piece has been performed once, and here's how it sounded." Chances of selling some of those CDs to help cover some of the cost? Very small, since no one has heard of the piece before. He's going to have to give them away and hope they make their way into the hands of important people. 2. One of the big choirs I sing with commissioned a piece from a composer last year, in honor of our choir's 75th anniversary. Large music organizations do that fairly frequently. So, how did this particular composer get the job? Picture yourself being on the 75th anniversary committee, sitting under flickering fluorescent-lights in your group's practice space. You decide to have a big party, someone is put in charge of bringing paper plates and napkins, you discuss whether this anniversary is big enough that you should rent out some nice space for the party and hire a professional caterer and invite donors and notify the local arts reporter for the paper. Someone suggests commissioning a piece as a lasting memorial to the anniversary. Who you gonna call? John Williams? Nope. He's not going to want to deal with you, unless you are a major symphony or a movie soundtrack. But everyone in the room probably has a composer friend or two from music school. You bring samples of their work to the next committee meeting, and you pick the one who seems to do work that would be a good fit for your group. So, stay in touch with old friends on Facebook so they know you are still composing. And put links to your new music on the web where it is google-able. Don't be pushy, just make sure your random acquaintances are aware of what you do for a living, and have a way to check you out if they are curious. Smaller music organizations, where no one has a composer friend, will often have contests to compose them a piece for an anniversary or other event. It's totally possible that Merna will be put in charge of advertising the contest, and Merna will have no idea where to advertise it, so google regularly and check weird back-alley music websites for composition contests. (The church I sing with had a contest to compose a hymn for our anniversary a few years back. I never heard about the contest until the winner was selected and I work for the music department. The winning selection was fairly un-sing-able because there were so few pieces submitted for consideration.) 3. The church choir I sing with is always over-budget, because we need an organ prelude and postlude, a choral prayer response, a choral benediction, and two choral anthems, in addition to hymns from the hymnal, for every Sunday and holiday service. We have a bell choir, three children's choir, a "once in a while" choir for people who sing well but can't make rehearsal every week and a regular adult choir with paid section leaders/soloists. That's a lot of music. Even with a good music library, you end up doing the same pieces over. But buying new music is expensive. So when our director finds something free from an unknown composer, or in the public domain, he's willing to give it a listen. We do lots of new music. Compose sacred music for choir, organ, and piano. There is such a need for volume of pieces that your chances of getting performed go up. We do some new work every year. Usually the composer is some friend of someone's daughter who has just graduated and put their music out there for free. Again, word of mouth is important. Stay in touch with people on Facebook. 4. I'm a soloist and sometimes I get called upon to sing something in particular, but sometimes people just need some music and they leave it up to me and the pianist to choose. So get your music out to soloists and small chamber groups you know who gig around, or at least make it very google-able in places they are likely to find you. These are not people with money to burn, so be sure you have good quality samples. I don't want to shell out for your piece on your website only to find out that there was a key change after the sampled section that takes it out of my range, or that there is a piano bridge in the middle that's just way to difficult to ask the accompanist to learn by Tuesday, given what they are paying her for this assignment. 5. One of my pieces got performed last year by a middle school choir. Finding quality music for younger musicians can be a real challenge. Directors frequently have very lopsided groups. 20 flutes, 20 trumpets, and one french horn. 40 sopranos, 40 altos and one shy bass. They need music for very specific configurations of instruments or voices that includes everyone, keeps everyone engaged and learning, but isn't too difficult. Rounds are good for kids just learning to read music. Since you can teach everyone their parts at the same time, you don't have kids running around the room while you teach just one group. Partner songs are good for the same reason. The teaching goes faster, so you can keep your class engaged and sight reading doesn't get in the way of music making. Pieces with a small solo in the middle are good, to challenge that one kid in the class who is already a decent musician from piano lessons, or whatever. Pieces where the soprano part is a little more challenging, and the bass part is very easy (because you've only got one bass, poor guy.) Schools generally have some sort of budget for buying new music every year, and the most important factor is that it work for the group of kids they have. It needs to be sound good enough to keep a middle or high school aged kid interested, (not babyish) but be workable in rehearsal for someone who has never touched a musical instrument before. Again, make sure your music is googleable. List specifics about the orchestration so that someone googling "easy flute trumpet tuba" will find your piece in their search results. Be sure they can preview the sheet music before they buy, so they can be sure it will work before they buy 50 copies. I only found out the middle school choir did my piece when I stumbled onto a video of them on youtube. I just put my sheet music out there for free and hope people will be able to find it.

Wow I wish the whole world was just an extension of my personal experience where everything is so simple and anybody with this sort of problem is just too stupid or scared to see and enact the solution like it is for this guy

As to U238's comments, I feel like this really needs to be said: Unless you are either (1) paying them very well or (2) already very established, performers are doing you a favour by performing your work--by taking a risk to spend their valuable time on a piece nobody has heard before. This is how all of us, performers and composers, get by in the music world: we help each other out. And that is precisely what the proposed competition (not to mention this entire site) is about: using our network on Young Composers to create new performance opportunities and improve our lot as composers. Given how much you seem to value the spirit of "networking", I'd think you would welcome this idea with open arms--heck, maybe even try to convince a few of your supposed multitudes of performer friends to record the winning composition--rather than trying to discourage young composers from taking the initiative to create outside-the-box performance opportunities.

You're absolutely right... in general, working with a pre-existing group (whether it's an orchestra, band, or a chamber group) is MUCH easier than recruiting individual performers and slapping something together. And to work with such a group, all you need is one contact (ideally the conductor), so U238's point seems like kind of a non-sequitur. Generally, community and school groups tend to be relatively open to performing new pieces (as long as they are relatively easy from a technical standpint). With professional orchestras, it's obviously a different story, but often they will have competitions where you can submit scores for readings or performances (the upside to these is that, if your music is good enough, you don't really have to "network" beforehand to get a good performance... but having the performance and recording under your belt gives you more credibility and, I think, makes it easier to get other performers interested in your work.) I feel like this leads to one of the central paradoxes of being a composer: to get good performers to take you seriously, you often need good recordings of your music, but to get good recordings, you need good performers to take you seriously. This is why competitions that offer a performance are an extremely valuable "foot in the door" to young composers... and why I think the DanDJTitchener's idea here is a very good one. On the relatively-unrelated note of young composers writing for large ensembles, I'd say that it isn't as clear-cut as U238 is making it out to be. We write what we hear, so if you grew up playing in a wind band, you're probably going to start off writing better band pieces than string quartets. Yes, there are elements of orchestration and balance that take years to master, but the same can be true for chamber music... in the latter case, you have to do more with less, which can take a lot of control-- and can be very daunting if you tend to think in broad gestures and varied colours, which you probably do if you play in bands and orchestras and are used to hearing that kind of music. (Steven Bryant, a relatively successful band composer, mentioned that he is terrified of writing chamber music and tries to avoid it at all costs.) There's no one right approach, and I think that kind of prescriptivism has led to the artistic downfall of many a young composer.