The primary goals of our call for scores are to build relationships with composers, get to know new 

music that we would love to perform, and to amplify awareness of new music so more musicians 
and organizations will consider getting to know you and programming your music. When we make 
our public announcement of finalists, we will also announce our committee members, which 
rotates each year. This year our committee is made up of 27 people, including 6 composers, 1 
conductor, 2 violinists, 2 violists, 1 cellist, 1 bassist, 2 flutists, 1 oboist, 1 clarinetist, 1 bassoonist, 1 
saxophonist, 2 hornists, 1 trumpeter, 1 harpist, 2 percussionist, 1 pianist, and 1 soprano.  
 
Before we make final programming decisions, our selection process goes through 3 rounds: 
preliminary, semi-final, and final. For each round and deciding what to advance, the most 
important question each committee member was encouraged to consider was which music they 
would most like to experience again as a listener. Committee members stressed again and again 
how challenging the decisions were at each stage. 
 
We also organized several zoom discussions for our committee to discuss the results between 
rounds, to ensure that our process is as equitable as possible for the committee and each 
applicant. Although the decisions for what music to advance are very difficult and subjective by 
nature, whenever a committee member encountered a work by someone they felt they might have 
a strong bias towards (friend, student, etc.), they made this known so additional people could 
review the work closely as well.  
 
In this year’s first round of 7824 works, each committee member was given a group of about 300 
applications to review on their own over several months, with the objective of recommending up 
to 20 works from this group to the next round, in addition to recommending any works from the 
complete list that weren’t from their group. So, some works that advanced to the second round 
received multiple votes, but any work that received at least one vote from any committee member 
was advanced to the semi-final round.  
 
For our 2nd round with 584 pieces, each committee member was divided into one of six groups, 
each with four or five people reviewing the same selection of 97 works. For this round, committee 
members were assigned a different group of music than the first round, and asked to recommend 
up to 10 works for the final round. Again, all committee members had access to the complete list 
and could recommend other pieces they strongly felt should advance, with any work that received 
at least one vote being advanced to the finals.  
 
Our committee is currently finishing the review of pieces selected for our final round (about 2% of 
applications). Each of the 27 committee members will review all of these works in detail, before we 
make our programming decisions, to be announced in early 2021. Our programming decisions are 
based on many factors such as balancing programming of works from our call for scores with 
commissions and other newer and older works, balancing programming by composers of diverse 
backgrounds and compositional styles, and how many works we have the financial means to 
perform and record.  
 
As you can imagine, programming decisions will also be especially difficult this season due to new 
challenges with fundraising and safely performing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When we 
canceled in person programming last spring, we used the resources we had to pay all of our 
musicians their complete fees for over a dozen scheduled concerts between March and June. We 
also started a relief fund to support composers and performers, which has funded over a third of 
the applicants that we received. Although this has left us with reduced resources for this season, 
we felt it was important to fully honor past commitments and support the most vulnerable people 
in our organization to the best of our ability.