ISCM World New Music Days 2025 - Scottish Section Shortlist
Chris Hutchings
Chris Hutchings is a composer based in Edinburgh, specialising in choral music. His works have been performed and commissioned worldwide, with recent high-profile performances including a 1000-person choir in Finland as part of “Choirs For Ecocide Law”, and a premiere in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History underneath a T-rex skeleton.
He has won several awards, including Kantos Choir’s 2021 composition competition with “When The Snow Came” and City of Oxford Choir’s 2025 competition with “Monster”.
Chris is passionate about social and environmental justice, and runs #ChoirsForClimate, providing resources and music to choirs for campaigning about the environment, and #ChoirsAgainstRacism, sharing anti-racism and social justice music and more. Most of the music on those sites is available under Creative Commons licenses.
Chris attended school in Edinburgh and studied mathematics at the Cambridge as an undergraduate, before postgraduate study in music at Hull and Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh with his family.
Submitted work: Monster
Claire McCue
Claire McCue is an award winning Scottish composer, and also lyricist, orchestrator and music educator.
She enjoys composing for anything from soloists to full orchestra, and has collaborated across a variety of art forms including dance, drama, visual arts and animation. Her work has been commissioned / performed by soloists, duos, many chamber ensembles, orchestras and choirs including national and other prominent ensembles including RSNO orchestra and youth chorus, NYCoS, NYCNI, NYOS, Fidelio trio, Nordic New Music Days festival 2025, The Sixteen, Royal Opera House children’s chorus, Farnham YC and award winning new music ventures such as Red Note ensemble, The Night With..., and Sound Festival. Her music has been performed across the UK, internationally, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, BBC Scotland, BBC Scotland TV.
She has been shortlisted twice for the Scottish New Music Awards and was a previous British finalist for ISCM World Music Day.
Submitted work: No Ear-rest for the Nearest
Louise Harris
Louise Harris is an electronic and audiovisual composer, and a Professor of Audiovisual Composition at The University of Glasgow. She specialises in the creation and exploration of audiovisual relationships utilising electronic music, recorded sound and computer-generated visual environments. Louise’s work encompasses fixed media, live performance and large-scale installation pieces, with a recent research strand specifically addressing Expanded Audiovisual Formats (EAF) and data-drive audiovisualisation. She is also a scholar of audiovisual composition with her first monograph, Composing Audiovisually, published in 2021.
Submitted work: Eira
Oliver Iredale Searle
Oliver is a Glasgow-based composer and educator and is Head of Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He has written a wide variety of works for many professional, amateur, youth and theatre organisations, which have been broadcast and performed around the world, and is interested in developing new environments for new music, collaborating with other artists and organisations to find ways to communicate to new audiences. His music is regularly inspired by a sense of place, as demonstrated by the submitted work - Sauchiehall – which was inspired by music and musicians in the city of Glasgow, Scotland.
Submitted work: Sauchiehall
Rūta Vitkauskaitė
Rūta Vitkauskaitė is a composer whose music bridges classical traditions with ancient tribal music and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Her works, described as exploring “fundamental matters” and “the shapes of the collective unconscious” (MIC), have been performed by ensembles and soloists including the BBC Singers, Manchester Collective, Ligeti Quartet, Martynas Levickis, and Daniele Roccato, and featured at festivals such as Gaudeamus, Nordic Music Days, Gaida, and ISCM World New Music Days. Broadcasts include BBC Radio 3 and Deutschlandradio Kultur.
Vitkauskaitė’s electro-acoustic opera Confessions won Lithuania’s Golden Stage Cross and has been performed over 50 times in Europe. Her Walking Opera represented Aarhus – European Capital of Culture 2017. She holds a PhD from the Royal Academy of Music, London, and was awarded ARAM in 2024. Recipient of multiple awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composers’ Scheme and Lithuanian Composers’ Union Best Composition, she teaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, advocates for accessible new music, and publishes with Composers Edition.
Submitted work: Cracks
Silver Chamber
Stephen J Brown emerged as a composer through his master’s degree at the Royal Northern College of Music, which he enrolled on with the exclusive aim of developing his Silver Chamber concept: a method of reinventing classical arrangement by original composing through popular instrumentation. Its purpose is to break down the divides between popular genres and classical music by dispelling adherence to categorisation to explore commonalities in musical structure more freely.
With a musical background as a heavy metal guitarist and a professional background in architecture & design, Brown’s compositional style is a unification of seemingly contradictory elements. A graduate from the Glasgow School of Art, he applies his understanding of form and structure to the domain of sound, naturally leading to the deconstruction of genre and a reinvention of the hierarchy of instrument roles to allow for a new expression of music-making.
Submitted work: Prometheus
ISCM World New Music Days 2026
The Scottish Music Centre proudly invites Scottish and Scotland-based composers to submit their scores for World New Music Days Romania 2026, to be held in Bucharest from 23rd to 31st May.
The 2026 WNMD festival is subtitled “Columna Infinita”, inspired by the famous sculpture by 20th-century Romanian art icon Constantin Brâncuși (whose sesquicentennial will be celebrated in 2026).
The ISCM World New Music Days festival is an esteemed annual event showcasing contemporary musical compositions from around the world. It serves as a platform for musical exchange, fostering innovation, creativity, and cultural dialogue.
Please refer to the official Call for Works document, complete with guidelines, available here. The submission form will be accessible starting Wednesday, 6th of August, at 10AM.
Only one submission per composer is allowed.
Priority is given to works under 10 minutes, composed post-2020
Please note, submissions from composers featured in WNMD 2025 Portugal will not be considered.
Deadline for applications is 6PM, Monday, 8th September 2025. Late submissions will not be considered.
