Open call: Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition

In the previous five editions, young composers from over 65 countries submitted around 960 compositions. Since its first edition in 2010, the competition has committed to promoting contemporary piano literature for children and young people. The task is to write a piano work in a contemporary tonal language that is easily realisable for piano lessons thus providing young players with adequate artistic access to the music of the present.

The Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition is distinguished by its particularly transparent and fair selection process. From the multitude of submissions, a selection of anonymised pieces will be presented in a multi-day judging process by students from the Ludwig van Beethoven Department of Piano in Music Education and will be publicly discussed by a renowned, international jury. The upcoming edition welcomes Michael Jarrell, Elena Mendoza, Isabel Mundry, Miroslav Srnka and Marco Stroppa as jury members.

The competition prizes are €6 500, €4,500 and €3 500. The award-winning pieces will be published in cooperation with Universal Edition. Audio recordings of these works will also be published on the mdw media library. Composers up to the age of 40 are invited to submit pieces digitally.

The deadline for submissions is 20 September 2024. The performances, the public judging process and the decision will take place from 4 to 7 February 2025 in English in the Fanny Hensel Hall of the mdw and online via live stream.

Information about the modalities and procedure of the competition as well as the possibility of submitting can be found here.

Application process

Applications must be submitted here before 20 September 2024.

For the digital submission, applicants should follow the following steps:

• Register with name and email address.
• Applicants will receive an email with a link to validate their email address.
• After logging in, applicants should fill out the form personal data and upload a photo. 
• Under ‘anonymised data’, artists should upload a composition as a PDF file. The composition will be passed on to the jury without any of the artist’s personal data. Therefore, artists should make sure that this PDF file does not contain any personal data or metadata.
• Artists can finalise the submission after saving all information and uploads, after confirming that they have read and understood the competition’s legal information and acknowledged the data protection declaration. After finalising the submission artists will not be able to make any changes in their personal data or composition.
• A five-digit code will then be generated automatically. This code will identify the artist’s composition till the end of the competition.
• Artists will receive an email which will confirm their registration, and again inform them about the code of their composition.

View the original call here.