2026 Call for Scores

Winners announced!

Our 2026 Call for Scores is now completed. Thank you to all composers for sharing your music with us. As always, it was a pleasure listening to these works over the past month.

We are delighted to announce this year’s two winners:
Fergus Hall and Kate Milligan.

Both composers will write us a quartet to sit alongside Henri Dutilleux’s Les Citations and Bára Gísladóttir’s Seven heavens (of different heights (and depths)) in our chamber programme at The Night With… in February 2027.

Fergus Hall is a musician, composer, multidisciplinary artist and music educator from the west of Scotland, based in Glasgow. His work spans contemporary classical music, jazz, Scottish traditional music, sound art, free improvisation and electronic music, with a particular interest in collaborative practices that give performers an equal creative voice. Much of his work explores the natural environment, ecology and conservation, particularly Scotland’s coastlines and seas.

Fergus has received commissions from Glasgow New Music Expedition, Nevis Ensemble, Sound and Music, Making Music UK, An Tobar, Sound Festival and CoMA. In 2023 he joined the Royal Philharmonic Society Composer Programme, writing for The Hermes Experiment, and in 2025 was awarded the Young Classical Artists Trust Composer Fellowship for 2025/26, creating new works for the Fibonacci Quartet and cellist James Morley for premiere at Wigmore Hall.

His music has been performed by ensembles and musicians including Hebrides Ensemble, Sequoia Duo, Fergus McCreadie, Matt Carmichael and the Edinburgh Quartet. His releases include Shores (2021), setting poetry by Sorley MacLean for folk singer, jazz quartet and string orchestra, and Isola (2022), an album of music for violin and cello with Sequoia Duo. He also collaborated with artist Mhairi Killin on On Sonorous Seas, exploring the relationship between the militarisation of Scotland’s seas and their ecosystems.

Fergus forms the multidisciplinary duo Long Green Jaws with Sarah McWhinney, creating performances combining music, puppetry, storytelling and visual theatre. He studied music at the University of Glasgow and composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and also works as a music educator and conductor.

Kate Milligan (NL/AU) is an Australian composer and designer based between Amsterdam and Sydney. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary research, exploring themes of temporality, ecology, and more-than-human creativity. Her compositions feature delicate sonic processes, and soundworlds that are equally intimate and expansive. She is interested in the ethics of collaboration with natural systems, and in creative communication about climate change. Most recently, Kate’s work has taken a material turn towards water: watery logic, leaky ideologies, fluid bodies.

She has won ‘Work of the Year’ three times at the Australian Art Music Awards: in 2024 with her performance-installation Visions | Vestiges in the Chamber Music category; and in 2025 and 2026 in the Electroacoustic/Sound Art category with Tactus and Dark Oceanography respectively. She has been commissioned by ensembles and projects including ELISION Ensemble, Decibel New Music Ensemble, The Sound Collectors Lab, Standard Issue, the London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub, and the Australian National Academy of Music, amongst others. Her most recent work—Keystones (music at the edge of rupture), an octet premiered at the 50th anniversary Spitalfields Music Festival—is a site-responsive work for the Islington Tunnel, London, and positions composition and arts research methodology as a kind of multi-species ethnography.

With a background in feminist musicology, Kate’s music-making often engages critically with institutions and ideology. Her existing research examines musical-discursive manifestations of popular and neoliberal feminisms in orchestral conducting, as well as identity and aesthetics in new opera. Her writing on new music and art is published in both popular and academic contexts. 

Kate is currently a PhD student at The University of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music, within the Australian Research Council Laureate Project ‘Resonant Earth: Music, Ecology and Climate Justice’, directed by Prof. Liza Lim. She is a graduate of Information Experience Design (MA) at the Royal College of Art, London. This study was generously supported by the Schenberg Music Fellowship and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. She also holds a MMus (musicology) and a BA(Hons) (composition) from The University of Western Australia, where she studied with James Ledger, and under the supervision of Doctors Sarah Collins and Cecilia Sun.