ON June 1, the Ivors Academy announced its open call for submissions for consideration for its annual composer awards.

This occasion is usually a positive event as historically the awards have been seen as one of the few industry awards where composers are directly assessing their equals.

However, this year has been marked by the shadow of the significant price hike, which now demands non-members of the Ivors Academy pay £100 to merely be judged.

Charging for competitions and awards is not a new issue for musicians and composers, throughout history, and organisations like Sound and Music or the Musicians Union itself have been part of efforts to remove them entirely.

Similarly, for the Ivors Academy, charging non-members is not new either, but a shift from £10 in 2020 to £100 now (after being £40 as recently last year) is a move that can only be seen as an ideological shift.

Similarly, the announcement from the Ivors Academy highlighting professional members can enter for free, though glossing over the cost of £179 for the privilege.

This price hike, combined with the overall changes to the categories and charging £420 per person to attend the awards, shows it is wanting the awards to be glitzier and more media-orientated.

In this era of massive cuts to the arts and further alienation for working-class people in the arts, this particular shift is an alarming development, especially for a membership organisation like the Ivors.

The response from composers has been pretty universal, with many decrying the changes including previous winners of awards. Alongside this, there have been active calls for a boycott of the awards entirely, with singer and composer Sarah Dacey preparing a fringe event named Decomposing Party for Composers and Performers. Similarly, an open letter is being circulated and gathering momentum.

Overall, if this change remains and is not overturned what will happen is the awards will become a playground for publishers, big media groups and middle-class individuals who are able to fling money around (regardless of talent).

The Ivors Academy, like the Independent Society of Musicians, is a membership group which means unlike other awards they can be more representative of the people who work within the sector, and it can be an opportunity for talent alone to be the leading judgement of work.

Bela Bartok famously said “competitions are for horses” but at least horses get to run on the same track.

Classical music is often brushed off as a “middle-class” artform which has little to say to working-class people. This has been something I have vocally rejected, but when we are in a situation where musicians are struggling to consistently earn more than £20,000 a year, only 13 per cent in the arts are working class, and now one of the few awards that could be seen as peer-to-peer is pricing people out of their own awards, there is little space for working-class people to be recognised and celebrated.

This needs to be defeated, simply for the principle that awards should be a judge of talent not disposable income. And I can take solace in the fact this is one of the rare occasions when composers agree quite so much.