2023 Chamber Music Composition Competition

Deadline: June 30th 2023 @ 11:59pm EDT

Apply for the 2023 Competition here!

100 Years of Musical Innovation

In 2022 we celebrated the centennial of "Pershing's Own" and our national heritage of creativity in American chamber music by hosting the first ever Chamber Music Competition: we received 209 entries from Americans around the world, and were thrilled with the winning pieces, runners up, and the excellence of the entries in general. Following the inaugural year of this new competition, we welcome the next century of innovation, diversity, and excellence.

Meet Last Year's Winners!

Congratulations to Susanna Hancock and David Clay Mettens for their winning submissions to the 2022 inaugural, centennial edition of the Pershing's Own Chamber Music Composition Competition!

See Last Year's Competition Details

Hollows, by David Clay Mettens / Winner of the 2022 TUSAB Chamber Composition Competition

limbic resonance, by Susanna Hancock / Winner of the 2022 TUSAB Chamber Composition Competition

Susanna Hancock

2022 Winner

Susanna Hancock

2022 Winner

Susanna Hancock is an Asian-American composer whose music explores color, process, and acoustic phenomena. Her music draws from a wide array of influences including minimalism, spectralism, math rock, and electronic mediums. Susanna’s compositions have been performed by wildUp, JACK Quartet, ZAFA Collective, Metropolis Ensemble, Desdemona Ensemble, ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and St. Louis Symphony, among others. Susanna’s work has been recognized by organizations such as ASCAP, New Music USA, and United States Artists, and has been featured in concerts and festivals across the world including the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, and Vox Novus/Composers Voice Concert Series, among others. Susanna is co-founder and co-artistic director of Terroir New Music, a concert/event series started in 2017 that pairs the music of living composers with local food and drink. Terroir is focused on fostering meaningful collaborations among creatives in an immediate area and is the coalescence of Susanna’s passion for contemporary music and lifetime of experience in the food service industry. The concepts of terroir and community-building are central tenets of all Susanna’s compositional and creative projects. Susanna holds a Master of Music in Theory & Composition degree from New York University, and Bachelor of Composition and Bassoon Performance degrees from the University of South Florida. Primary teachers have included Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and Baljinder Sekhon.

limbic resonance

by Susanna Hancock

limbic resonance

by Susanna Hancock

Limbic resonance can be described as “a symphony of mutual and internal adaptation.” The premise that humans will subconsciously synchronize with others closest to them is explored here, as musicians gradually move out of hocket to new mechanisms within their instrument families, and then ultimately create uniformity across the ensemble. Each section of this piece is modeled after one facet of a sound amplitude envelope, or ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) and altogether displays a transition from non-pitched sound to wholly sympathetic vibration.

David Mettens

2022 Chamber Competition Winner

David Mettens

2022 Chamber Competition Winner

"The Chicago Tribune has praised the music of David “Clay” Mettens (b.1990) as “a thing of remarkable beauty,” displaying a “sensitive ear for instrumental color.” His recent work seeks to distill the strange and sublime from the familiar. He reflects upon the experience of wonder in music that ranges from rich and sonorous to bright and crystalline, seeking expressive immediacy in lucid forms and dramatic shapes. His work has been recognized with the 2021 Hermitage Prize from the Aspen Music Festival and School, a 2020 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Ithaca College’s 2018 Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, first prize in the 2018 Salvatore Martirano Composition Competition, a 2016 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and the 2015 SCI/ASCAP graduate student commission. He received a commission from the American Opera Initiative for a one-act opera, which was premiered in December 2015 by the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, and his orchestral works have been performed by orchestras across the United States and Europe. His music appears on recordings by the Grossman Ensemble (Fountain of Time, 2020), Fuego Quartet (Migration, 2019), Lotus (Rogue Lotus, 2018), and American Wild Ensemble (Music in the American Wild, 2018). Mettens is currently a teaching fellow in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, where he finished a PhD in 2021, studying with Anthony Cheung, Sam Pluta, and Augusta Read Thomas. He earned his master's degree at the Eastman School of Music and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina with a degree in music composition and a clarinet performance certificate. "

Hollows

by David Clay Mettens

Hollows

by David Clay Mettens

Hollows takes as its subject a sense of separation, distance, and “in-betweenness.” These aspects are dramatized in the music formally as periods of stasis and quiet between active, busy sections, as well as registral separation of the instruments—piccolo and bass clarinet moving in parallel perpetual motion, and bare, wide dyads in the mid-low register of the piano. These two principal ideas alternate over the course of the piece, however, the piccolo and bass clarinet music from the piece’s opening returns each time wispier or more hollowed out than the last. The first repetition is a mercurial, quicksilver solo for clarinet and the second a blurry recollection of the opening with fluttertongue piccolo and tremolo strings. I was interested in framing or contextualizing the static sections between breathless fast music. As a result, the slow music serves as the expressive core of the piece, while also influencing and transforming the fast music until these contrasting moods reach a kind of equilibrium in the coda. Hollows was written for and premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Music Ensemble.

2023 Eligibility

Carefully review the requirements below for submission eligibility. Then, please feel free to apply with your best submission or inquire further at the contact information near the bottom.

Apply Here!

Composer Eligibility Requirements:

Must be a citizen or permanent resident of the United States of America.
There is no age limit, but composers should be in the earlier stages of their careers (if in doubt: apply).
By submitting, composers waive their synchronization rights for US Army Band "Pershing's Own" video performances of the submitted work.
If chosen, composer agrees to participate in video interviews to support our production of their work.

Submission Eligibility Requirements:

Submitted works must not already be recorded by a major ensemble or available on a commercial record release.
Works should be composed within the most recent 15 years (on or after July 1st, 2008)
Parts must be ready and deliverable by October 1st, 2023.
Maximum of 1 (ONE) submission per composer.
Suggested maximum of 15 minutes in length: longer pieces may be considered, but are either unlikely to be fully reviewed, or—if chosen as a winner—to be performed in their entirety.
Diverse styles of music are welcome for consideration, to include jazz or traditional music. The external review panel will have at least one jazz/commercial music composer. See section below on review methodology.
Works submitted should be primarily acoustic in nature, but electronic components are welcome. It is strongly recommended that composers submitting works with electronic aspects inquire ahead of time to be certain that we have the capability of translating the intended effect well over a videorecording.
Between 3-15 players. Standard doublings are acceptable (i.e. clarinet/bass clarinet). Here is a list of the types of instrumentalists available at Pershing's Own:
- Flute/piccolo/alto flute
- Oboe/English horn
- Bassoon
- Clarinet (alto/bass/Bb/A/Eb)
- Saxophones (SATB available)
- Trumpet/cornet/flugelhorn
- French Horn
- Trombone & Euphonium
- Tuba
- Violin
- Viola
- Cello
- Harp
- Percussion (inquire for specifics)
- Drum set
- Bass (acoustic or electric)
- Piano / Keyboards
- Guitar (all types, acoustic, electric, banjo, mandolin, etc.)
- Voice (all styles and ranges)
- Electronics (please inquire for specifics before applying)

2023 Submission Instructions

To apply, please submit your compositions (maximum of 1 per composer) to our form using the "Apply Here!" red button on this page.

Apply Here!

2023 Panel Review Methodology

Submissions are reviewed in three stages:

A preliminary panel of musicians and composers at Pershing's Own will review applications for eligibility and rules compliance. If the remaining submissions total at more than 50, a cursory quality review will reduce the pool to no more than 50.

An external review panel of four esteemed composers—unaffiliated with the military, but representative of American compositional prowess—will review the entries for the highest quality compositions.

As a diversity of compositional styles are welcome, one of the panelists will be a composer with expertise in jazz and/or commercial music.

They will adjudicate according to their own personal compositional value systems, adhering to a 1-5 numerical ranking system. Their results will be numerically tallied without discussion; the panel will not discuss works with each other except in the event that their numerical rankings do not yield a consensus. This panel will make a recommendation to Pershing's Own for the best quality compositions of the field.

Out of the external review panel's consensus recommendations, a final panel of Pershing's Own musical leadership will determine which works to schedule for video recording. These will be declared the winner(s) and the remaining recommendations will be honored as runners up. Our ensemble's pragmatic ability to learn, execute, and record the work well is a factor in this final review.

Contact

Please direct all questions to Sergeant First Class Doug O'Connor, NCOIC of the Chamber Music Series and competition coordinator, at douglas.h.oconnor.mil@army.mil.

Email SFC O'Connor