04/03/2022–06/03/2022

The 2022 Festival of Contemporary Music for All took place over the weekend 4-6 March with more than 30 events at 20 events throughout the UK and beyond and also online. See the map at the bottom of the page for the Festival locations.

The Festival is a biennial event, bringing together music makers of all experiences and backgrounds, providing opportunities to premiere commissioned works alongside professional players and take part in a range of workshops, developments and concerts. As a grass-roots expression of music making, the Festival provides opportunities for unique artistic experiences as widely as possible, opening a culture of musical participation in contemporary music making.

The next festival will be in March 2024. Do contact Tamara Kohler (tamara@coma.org) if you are interested in participating.

What is the festival?

Projects

Read about Listening Grounds, a major online project for the Festival.

Find out about my sounds, a free creative music project for 14-18 year old musicians, composers and sound explorers.

Commissions

This year’s Festival commissions were:

Hooligans by Oliver Leith
Outside Phrases Heloise Werner
and the leaves still grow by Xia Leon Sloane
Group Hug by Yshani Perinpanayagam
Storyteller by Amy Bryce
if you could just get the cobweb by Emily Ebdy
What to Play and How to Play it by Simon Knighton
I <3 You by Elischa Kaminer (work in progress)
Departure by Atefeh Einali

The Festival also saw the launch of choral partsongs, a collection of twelve works for larger vocal groups by Paul Burnell, Alexander Campkin, Jürg Frey, Hollie Harding, Joel Järventausta, Hannah Kendall, Catherine Lamb, Janet Oates, Yshani Perinpanayagam, Shirley Thompson, Andrew Toovey and James Weeks. Find our more or order your copy here.

Funders

CoMA gratefully acknowledges funding support for the Festival commissions from Arts Council England, The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust, PRS Foundation, Samuel Gardner Memorial Trust, RVW Trust and Youth Music.

We are part of the Keychange initiative encouraging festivals and music organisations to achieve a 50:50 gender balance by 2022.

We commit to Sound and Music’s Fair Access Principles, designed to act as a code of best practice for running successful, open and inclusive artist development programmes, competitions and awards for composers.