Call for Scores | KHORIKOS

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1560

Call for Scores - August 2024

KHORIKOS, the NYC-based vocal ensemble, is accepting score submissions for our next concert project. We’re curating music that considers ambition, a word with many definitions and connotations, encompassing drive, purpose, yearning, desire, success, greed, and much more.

Send us your best work for mixed a cappella choir that connects in some way to these ideas. We welcome your interpretation of these words, and our curation process is open to a variety of perspectives. Read below for more guiding ideas, but first, some key details:

Submission deadline is September 1st, 2024.
One submission per composer. No age limit. Only submissions made by the composers themselves will be considered.
Maximum duration of 15 minutes. Shorter works are welcome.
Your submission must include an audio representation of your score in some form (please see below for details).
KHORIKOS is a balanced choir of 24 SATB voices.
Any level of technical difficulty welcome — your imagination is the limit.
We charge a $5 submission fee, which will go directly toward producing this concert event. Please see below for more about how this fee makes our work possible.
We will confirm receipt of your submission once the deadline has passed.

SUBMIT YOUR SCORES HERE

If selected, your music will be given meaningful aesthetic attention during a thorough rehearsal process — not just a clean reading.

Sending an audio file along with the score is necessary in order to streamline the selection process. This could be a MIDI realization, a rehearsal/performance recording, or a recording of a piano/instrumental reduction — in any case, the audio must sufficiently represent the score.

Audio must be uploaded through our online form, or you must provide a direct link to a downloadable file (please make sure these links remain active through October 1st, 2024.) Please do not link to a streaming platform.

We’ve decided to charge a small submission fee to offset the cost of this project. KHORIKOS is an all-volunteer organization, dedicated to celebrating new choral music. Whether or not your piece is programmed, your submissions will support our work of bringing amazing music to new audiences.

If you experience issues submitting through our form, contact us at scores@khorikos.org. We will not accept submissions over email unless you contact us first.

Lastly, whether or not you’re submitting a piece, please help us share this post with music communities and composers around the world.

Thank you for your music!

Thank you for taking in these ideas and sharing your music. This focused call for scores is an experiment for KHORIKOS, and we look forward to learning how you relate and respond to these concepts.

Our Focus on Ambition

At the heart of our project about ambition is Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia. W.H. Auden wrote the poem that Britten would set to music in 1942, imploring the patron saint of music to “come down to startle composing mortals with immortal fire.”

Earlier that year, Auden wrote a letter to Britten, after a tumultuous point in their relationship:

As you know, I think you are the white hope of music; for this very reason I am more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think I know something about the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist because they are my own.

. . .

You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself . . ., i.e., to build yourself a warm nest of love by playing the lovable talented little boy.

If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; i.e., you will have to be able to say what you never yet had the right to say - God, I’m a shit.

The text of Hymn to St. Cecilia includes:

I cannot grow; I have no shadow to run away from, I only play

I cannot err; there is no creature whom I belong to, whom I could wrong

All you liv’d through, dancing because you no longer need it, for any deed

I shall never be different.

Love me.

This is Britten reckoning with purpose, responsibility, affirmation, and growth, having already achieved career success on multiple fronts at 28. Auden saw fit to intervene, and challenge Britten’s complacency with and within these metrics of success.

Through our curation process, we intend to explore the origins of ambition, and how it shapes our motivations and responsibilities as artists and humans, for better and worse.

“The Difficult Ideal,” from Pam Rehm’s Time Will Tell:

If you accept

fate’s feats

you will be guided

Otherwise,

pulseless disguises

compete

We either give

or withhold

heartbeats

Thank you for taking in these ideas and sharing your music. This focused call for scores is an experiment for KHORIKOS, and we look forward to learning how you relate and respond to these concepts.