Open Call for Scores

Close No Circle provides a platform for composers from around the world to try out their ideas and get their music recorded.

This is not a competition. Granted your piece meets our submission criteria, we will review your piece and contact you if we are interested. 

Tenets:

• 1. The composition must involve some aspect of real-time indeterminacy, performer choice, or improvisation.

• 2. The composition should, mostly, not be through-composed. Instead, there should be a high degree of performer agency allowed.

• 3. The composition must be easily put together in one rehearsal. Avoid determinate vertical synchronizations, difficult rhythms, or syncopated passages. Use of extended technique is permissible to the point that the composition as a whole can be organized in one rehearsal. (Vertical synchronizations are permissible if cued by either musician, conductor, or event in the music.)

• 4. The music must be fun to play. It serves neither the composer nor the musician to write indeterminate music that is difficult, for the sake of being difficult.

• 5. The composition may employ specific instruments, however, music like this is best served when it is written for open instrumentation. Thus, any instrument should reasonably be able to play the material.

• 6. And finally, some additional brief guidelines:

  •  Avoid complex instructions. Focus on simple rulesets. 

  • Favor visual instruction over written instruction. Unless your piece is a 'text score,' the number of words in the instructions should not greatly exceed the number of notes or measures. 

  • The overall goal of the piece should be easily comprehended at a glance. 

  • Musicians are not computers - avoid complex logic trees. 

  • Less is more.

Submission Requirements:

• Please submit your score/parts in PDF format.

• Instructions on how to perform the piece may be either in short essay format, or written inline with the music itself. If the piece does not already have written instructions, you do not need to create them for this submission. In fact, we appreciate pieces whose instructions can be understood without the need for verbose written instruction.

• Because these are open form scores, the size and shape of the scores is up to you. We are not picky about this...but don't go too crazy.
  Make sure we can still print and read your music.

• Thought not a hard requirement if you have a recording or other audible rendering of your music, please include it!

• You may submit under your legal name, a pseudonym, or anonymously. 

• Email your scores to closenocircle@gmail.com