ORTUS
Four times now, KHORIKOS has done wide-open calls for scores, framed as new music competitions. This has been our way of meeting almost all of the composers that we’ve since come to build deeper relationships with. At this point, the composers we end up commissioning are writing for *individual singers* within the ensemble and timing the rests in their pieces to accommodate the four-second reverb in our home space.
We’ve gotten over six hundred submissions for each call. Among those, roughly twenty finalists go to the group, who then vote to pick the ten winners that we go on to perform. Choral music is niche enough that we’ve attracted composers signed by major labels, tenured academics, and high school students, who are all on equal footing at the start of the process.
After a thousand scores, it’s become clear that pieces that make it through the process say what they intend to say, and expose their authors in all their humanity.
As fruitful as this has been, we can’t do this in this way anymore, on account of the hundreds of hours of score review each of these competitions required. But we’re carrying the call-for-scores into our future (in a more focused way) in order to bypass the Spotify algorithm and who-I-happen-to-meet-at-parties as ways of determining who and what gets programmed.
For me, the call-for-scores process is a step into the unknown, which is what makes it worth returning to, so that our repertoire and the energy everyone pours into it is never a static, closed thing.
KHORIKOS is neither a history museum nor a laboratory; we want to meet composers who will latch on to whatever it is about our aesthetic that makes us different.
