The NMC Songbook

Choose your favourite song – and win a signed copy of its score!

The NMC label – devoted to supporting and recording new British music – celebrated its 20th anniversary last year by commissioning almost 100 of the UK’s leading composers to contribute one song each to a box set.

They rose to the challenge, and the NMC Songbook is a fascinating insight into song-writing today, from the more conventional to the innovative and ambitious, with texts ranging from Dickens and Burns to a Leyton Orient football chant and an extract from a National Trust Houses and Gardens guide. The recording – made across a month at London newly-built Kings Place concert hall – went on to win the Contemporary category in the 2009 Gramophone Awards.

Gramophone went along to the sessions, and you can read Patrick O’Connor’s report in the May 2009 edition. You can also read David Gutman’s review of the box set, from the same issue.

NMC Songbook Competition

NMC has produced an online map with all the 96 songs marked on it – clicking on each map pin allows you to hear an excerpt from the song. But we’ve also chosen ten songs linked to different parts of the British Isles – either the composer was born or is based there, or the texts are somehow linked to the region – and marked these with a pink pin. Click on them, and you can listen to the entire work.

We are simply asking you to vote for your favourite of these ten. When all the votes are in we will reveal the most popular song, and everyone who chose it will be entered into a draw to win a copy of the winning score, signed by the composer, plus a box set of the NMC Songbook. Five runners-up will also receive a copy of the box set.

The ten songs are listed below – happy listening, and good luck!

Click this link to enter the NMC Songbook competition The songs you can choose from are:

Rupert Bawden Vocalise – Loch Lurgainn in the Sunshine
Donnacha Dennehy Swift’s Epitaph
Michael Finnissy Outside Fort Tregantle
Sadie Harrison Easter Zunday
Morgan Hayes Dictionary of London
Stuart MacRae The Lif of this World
Thea Musgrave A Winter’s Morning
Geoffrey Poole Heynonnynonny Smallprint
Edward Rushton With my Whip
Julia Simpson Bees a-zwarmen