16 November 2015
Newsdesk
Less time and less money: Sound and Music release this year’s Composer Commissioning Survey results.
Sound and Music have released the findings of this year’s Composer Commissioning Survey, offering insight into the reality of working as a composer today. Following on from questions asked in 2014, this year’s survey has highlighted a worrying trend: fewer commissions are available to composers than there were last year, and not enough time is allowed either for creating the work, or for preparing it for public performance. It also highlighted the gap between what professional composers regard as fair recompense for their work, and what in fact they are being offered.
This year Sound and Music also partnered with the Australian Music Centre, who ran the survey simultaneously in Australia. This has allowed both organisations to begin to consider international benchmarking, as well as to learn from the similarities and differences between the two environments in terms of how new music is commissioned and brought to life.
As last year’s results generated a lot of interest and concern, revealing that commissions were not a significant income source for a lot of composers, Sound and Music wanted to find out what – if anything – has changed. New questions were added about what composers considered were ‘fair’ fees for commissioning different scales of work. They also delved more deeply into statistical analysis, and drew comparisons (where possible) with the findings of 2014. As last year, respondents covered a balanced spread of experience and genre. The raw data from the survey (minus any personal identifiers) is now publicly available on the Sound and Music website.
The key findings are….
The average commission fee from our respondents is £918.
Last year this figure was £1,392. The new figure takes into account a clearer question format as well as deeper statistical analysis; also, it is unlikely that exactly the same people completed the survey as last year. Whilst not directly comparable therefore, the new figure is still incredibly low. In the Australian survey, the figure was lower still at $1581.30 (£731).
This is a lot less than composers think is fair
We asked respondents what they considered to be a fair fee for different types and scales of work, and this was consistently more than what they are actually being paid on average. For example, on average, composers thought a fair fee for a piece for up to 5 musicians would be around £3,000, compared to the actual average highest fee received which was £1,600.
There’s not enough time.
Time was a recurrent theme in the analysis of the data and this has come through even more strongly this year. Time is listed as one of the big reasons why respondents turn down commissions. It appears that commissioners do not always understand or allow for the time necessary for a composer to make a work nor the time needed to prepare and rehearse it for its first performance.
Responses from the survey suggest that commissions are less lucrative for AUS respondents
Australian respondents stated they earned less from commissions in comparison to UK respondents and when asked to recommend the fees for a number of commissioning scenarios, AUS respondents suggested lower fees than UK respondents for every single scenario. This indicates that Australian based commissioners place less value on composers, which is also echoed in some of the comments received.
Fewer commissions and lower earnings, again.
When asked to compare the last three years the majority of respondents thought that this year is the worst in terms of the number of and earnings from commissions.
