Four Minute Starters


Bromsgrove Concerts, through its Mixing Music series, wants to encourage young, unpublished composers and believes that providing an opportunity for their music to be performed by top professional musicians is one of the best ways of doing this. Hence the Four Minute Starters scheme which was first introduced in 1998 (although then it was actually called Three Minute Starters).

For most Mixing Music concerts, several compositions of around four minutes in duration are submitted to the musicians, who then decide which (if any) they would like to include in their concert programme.

The scheme is open to undergraduates or recent graduates of composition courses in the area. The following institutions are currently involved: Coventry University, Wolverhampton University, Birmingham Conservatoire.

An added bonus, of course, is that Mixing Music concert audiences get a chance to hear some fascinating new music by composers who they will hopefully be hearing a lot more of in the future.

Note that the Four Minute Starters scheme is no longer being operated.