| "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to create the kind of comprehensive new music organisation that
we have always dreamed of, offering enhanced provision for creators
and performers, students and audiences, and ultimately raising the
profile of new music and sound art within the wider culture."
Richard Baker— composer, conductor, lecturer and spnm Board
member
The boards of four of the UK’s leading organisations promoting
contemporary music and sound – BMIC, CMN, SAN and SPNM –
have voted in favour of joining forces to create a new, groundbreaking
national organisation which will become the UK’s leading champion
of new music and sound.
The board decisions mark the end of a phase that saw the four organisations
carry out a thorough process to test the idea of creating a united
organisation, funded by the Arts Council England’s Organisational
Development Thrive! Programme. This culminated in the creation of
a draft proposal for the new organisation, which has now been approved
by ACE.
The organisations are confident that there is a real need for an
organisation promoting new music and sound in the UK which is able
to provide creators and audiences with more resources and a louder
voice than any organisation in the sector is currently able to achieve.
They are also confident that a united organisation will be able
to fulfil this role.
The new organisation will be unique in its ability to make new
music and sound more visible, its combination of national and international
remit, its flexibility in not being tied to a venue or institution
and its focus both on the creator and creativity, and on audiences
and participants. The new organisation’s work will include
live events, discovery and promotion of practitioners, professional
development, learning and participation, information and resources,
the UK’s leading new music and sound website and an advocacy
programme to raise the profile of the art-form.
The organisations are now embarking on the detailed planning of
the new organisation, working together to define its work more closely.
In this they continue to be supported by ACE Thrive! funding. The
detailed planning phase is scheduled to be completed in summer 2008,
and it is currently planned that the new organisation will be created
in late 2008.
We expect to announce further information in May 2008.
The history of the project:
Discussions regarding new music and sound organisations forming
closer associations have taken place in various forms over the last
two decades. In the 1990’s an Arts Council Capital Lottery
grant funded a feasibility study into a new music centre, to be
based around a small performance space, that would allow seven new
music organisations to cohabit.
The impetus to take these ideas to a new level came from Arts Council
England, which initiated discussions in 2003/4. Initially the collaborative
project was led by a property initiative, Kings Place, and many
new music organisations were involved in plans to share premises.
However, as the project developed, the need for an entirely new
organisation that would be fit for purpose to provide change and
an improved profile for the sector became the priority, with its
realisation through a property solution a secondary consideration.
Five organisations – BMIC, CMN, NMC, SAN and SPNM –
applied for funding from Arts Council England’s Organisational
Development Thrive! scheme and were awarded £1.172 million
to fund the testing of the proposition of the merger and, if applicable,
its implementation. During this testing phase one of the organisations,
NMC, found that its best interests lay not in a formal merger but
in close collaboration with the other organisations.
At the end of 2007 BMIC, CMN, SAN and SPNM all took formal, board-level
decisions to merge and create a new organisation.
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