Gaudeamus Award 2025

DEADLINE FOR THE GAUDEAMUS AWARD WAS 1 OCTOBER 2024 23:59 CET

The Gaudeamus Award is our yearly incentive prize for young composers. Ever since the first winner (Peter Schat in 1957) the Award has been a kickstart for the career of many composers.

A maximum of five composers will be nominated for the Award. The nominees will be part of the Gaudeamus Festival 2025 (10-14 September). On the final night of the festival the winner of the Award will be chosen by an independent jury. The prize consists of a commission worth €5,000 for a new composition to be premiered at a future edition of the Gaudeamus Festival. The nominees’ main entries for the competition will be performed during the festival. They will also be commissioned to develop a new piece especially for the festival. After the festival, Gaudeamus will continue to support the nominated composers. Selected works may be performed elsewhere, and composers will be regularly involved in festivals and co-productions with other organizations. The intention is to further the career development of young composers.

Jury
The formation of the jury is crucial for a broad selection of nominees. We always form the jury with composers/performers, representing the broad spectrum of contemporary music. As a rule, the jury members are all teachers as well, at a school or privately, and the jury members will coach the nominees during the preparations for the festival. For 2025, the jury consists of Moritz Eggert,  Isabel Mundry and Yannis Kyriakides, replacing Elaine Mitchener who dropped out at the last moment.

The German composer Moritz Eggert (1965) is a much sought after composer for chamber music and opera. As a pianist he knows the contemporary music world from different sides; he won, among other things, a prize at the Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in 1989. There is room for a certain lightness and humor in his compositional work. He teaches at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich.

Composer Isabel Mundry (1963), also from Germany, is building her own compositional practice, in which she audibly repeatedly uses her (musicologist) knowledge of music history and her acquired expertise in electroacoustic practice. She teaches in Zurich and Munich and is also a fellow guest teacher at the Ferienkurse of the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969, emigrated to Britain in 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion and language and how that defines our experience of sound.

Gaudeamus Academy 2025
In the week before the Gaudeamus Festival (10-14 September 2025), the 5 nominated composers will work with the focus ensembles on their newly commissioned works and rehearse the selected works. The focus ensembles for 2025 will be known in October 2024. Members of the jury will facilitate discussions between composers and musicians. The Gaudeamus Academy will be devoted to the composers in the interest of research, reflection, and development, but will also feature meetings and workshops open to the public.

Registration fee & accommodation
The registration fee for the competition is € 35. After you are selected, accommodation and participation in the festival are free of charge. Also, the travel costs to and from Utrecht will be reimbursed to the participant. If for any reason, the registration fee is an obstacle that is preventing you from partaking in this call, please contact us via gaudeamusaward@gaudeamus.nl and we will see how we can accommodate you.

Questions
If you have any questions about the registration, please contact us via gaudeamusaward@gaudeamus.nl

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You can now register for the Gaudeamus Award 2025 via the form below. Composers/creators of any nationality or background who were born after 14 September 1989 may enter their works. Works may already have been performed but must be composed no more than 4 years ago.

We ask you to submit 3 pieces:
1. Your main entry must fit in one of the categories 1/2a/2b/3/4 (see below).
2&3. Two additional pieces to show the breadth of your practice as a composer/creator, that do not have to fit in any of the categories, but are restricted to a maximum of 15 instruments.

If you want to showcase your orchestral work, we provide the option to submit a 4th piece in the extra category Orchestra. This piece will not be performed during the Gaudeamus Festival, but might be selected to be performed by the Residentie Orchestra The Hague during a concert in Amare in The Hague, on a later date after the festival.

Please carefully read the information below and the terms and conditions before submitting!