Masterprize 2005

<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> Masterprize aims to encourage classical music enthusiasts to listen more to new music and to help living composers find a large international audience. "It is vital that living composers and music lovers grow closer, and everyone in the music world should encourage this. That is why Masterprize is such an important world-wide initiative, and I look forward to continuing to guide its development." Mariss Jansons, Artistic Director Extract from November 2003 issue of Gramophone magazine: 'The fact that Masterprize is a competition is almost secondary,' says John McLaren of the contest he launched in 1996. 'It has a more underlying mission, which is to say that for the health of music, new music needs to be a larger and growing element in general performance, both in the concert hall and on recordings. There is no other major art form where the relationship between the creators of the new and the audience has been in such poor condition.' Just look at literature, dance, film, theatre or the graphic arts, he says, and you'll see what he means. Ten years ago, when he first conceived the idea, 'it was still a time when one composer actually said "if at least half the audience doesn't walk out during the premiere of one of my works I feel I've failed". Imagine whether he would have said that if it he hadn't been subsidised up to the eye-balls? I remember when we first spoke to some of the critics and publishers, and they were still shaking their heads and saying: well what's the public got to do with it? The atmosphere has shifted hugely within the last ten years. But it still needs to shift further.' Instead of engaging in healthy dialogue with audiences, composers, McLaren felt, were labouring under 'the myth, which is an entirely 20th-century creation, that no composer can expect to be appreciated in his lifetime'. 'Masterprize is trying to send a signal to composers that it is possible to write for a broad international audience, without dumbing down or in any way compromising artistically. To try to persuade them that it's good to have an audience and that the audience reaction is a valid one.' Integral to this, of course, is encouraging the record-buying, concert-going classical enthusiast to explore their work. McLaren hopes Masterprize will go some way to persuade them that 'the era is hopefully drawing to an end where people dismissed them and patronised them, by assuming that their views were of no importance'. 'We've never said music should be tonal or harmonic or melodic or anything. We've never once said x is good and y is bad,' says McLaren. 'All we've said is that eventually the measure of it has to be: does anybody like it.' </BODY>