Fantasy Program Contest



S4M’s Fantasy Program Contest was held between January 17 and February 17, 2011. Visitors were asked to create their own program and win a prize.

S4M is a festival of orchestras built around programming. Orchestras are chosen for the festival on the basis of their programming, and in November we put the programs of orchestras applying for the 2013 S4M festival online, where visitors could comment on and rate them.

Here’s how the Fantasy Program Contest worked:

s4m

Be a Star!

Now it’s your turn. What do you think makes an outstanding orchestra program? Rather than just discuss it, we invite you to put yourself on the line and submit your own program. Just like the S4M orchestras, make a case for why your program is a great one. We’ll post it online and visitors to the S4M website can comment and vote on it. [submit a program]

Win a National Broadcast

When the contest closes Feb. 17, the program that has received the most votes by visitors to the S4M website will be declared the winner. The person submitting the winning program will help choose recordings of the works and the program will be broadcast nationally on radio on Performance Today. Performance Today is one of America’s most popular classical music radio programs, with more than 1.2 million weekly listeners on 237 stations around the country. The winning programmer will be a guest on the broadcast to help introduce the broadcast and talk about the program. [submit a program]

The Rules

There are few rules.

  • You don’t have to register for Spring For Music in order to vote. To submit a program you need to register. If you haven’t registered yet, you’ll be automatically taken to the registration page when you click to submit a program.
  • The voting is set up so that you’ll be able to vote only once for a program. But that doesn’t mean you can’t organize your friends to vote for you or someone you want to campaign for.
  • You can vote for multiple programs if you like. There’s no taking back a vote once you’ve cast it.
  • There’s no limit on how many programs you can submit. Obviously, programs submitted early in the contest will have more time to win votes than those submitted near the end. And we suspect (though we have no hard evidence for this) that making a compelling case for your program will be a huge advantage over merely submitting a list of pieces.
  • Pieces must be submitted in the order they would be played, and make sure you indicate where the intermission(s) (if any) would be.
  • There is no changing a program once you have submitted it. If someone votes on a program, that’s the program they’re voting on, so it can’t be changed.
  • Winner will be contacted after the contest closes to make arrangements for recordings and broadcast.