We asked our community: what are the challenges you have faced as a composer that you wish was talked about more in the classical music industry? Thank you for your honest responses, which we’ve published anonymously here. To take part in our next poll, sign up for our newsletter or follow us @alterclassical on Instagram.

- No funding. Few opportunities. The expectation that you can sacrifice everything.
- Knowing how much to value yourself for payment, and standards of treatment allow
- The amount of opportunities that don’t pay fairly on account of you being ‘emerging’
- Having to spend a lot of money on promoting your music
- Trying to receive funding for a project without having the portfolio to back it as an early career artist
- The investment media composers need to make for sample libraries/software
- Why are the majority of composer competitions strapped with entry fees?!
- Impostor syndrome, and feeling like your music should always be “intellectual” and “innovative”
- Feeling the need to justify my work as always new, radical, cutting edge, groundbreaking somehow
- Having confidence in my compositional abilities and ‘style(s)’, and not comparing myself to others
- The felt need to go into more commercial avenues and by extension potentially less interesting…
- Equal opportunities forms having a reverse effect feeling as though they are tick-box exercises for organisations to meet - just make submissions anonymous!
- The mental/social energy needed to “sell yourself” to lots of different people repeatedly
- That you have to market yourself on social media
- Wishing I could spend the time I feel I need to promote myself on social media to actually compose!
- The expectations establishments put on us in their calls to fit standards we don’t even know about
- The seemingly psychological “leg-up” you get from being able to say you attended a conservatoire when compared to a “normal” university
- Not being under 35
- Being a late developer and emerging
- The English presumption that emerging has to mean young
- The term emerging
- At one point I was emerging and by now I should have emerged. I’m almost 40 and still not quite there.
- The age limit placed on “being successful” in the public eye. The pressure to “emerge” with prominence and success before the age of 30 is a heavy, scary weight to move past. Why is there an age limit?
- The idea that everyone seems to think they know what your destination is, rather than asking you where you’d like to be. Artists constantly emerge. Until someone else (likely younger than you) labels you ‘heritage’.
- Trying not to get fired or made redundant in education work, when taking time off for composing
- Making a living from composition
- The inability to take time out to start a family, because there’s no support offered
- Not having a calendar of opportunities/commissions to look forward to - can be very sporadic and daunting
- Having to hide/play down the fact I am an aspiring composer when applying for jobs
- The hardest part of being a composer is being performed
- Feeling though I did not network enough in university and now I have no-one to perform my music
- Seeking ensembles to perform one’s new works, and getting commissions

Matthew Elderton-Lewis Is an early-career composer who has been commissioned, performed, featured and workshopped by ensembles such as the Essex Symphony Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Phacelia Ensemble, Riot Ensemble, Chroma Ensemble, Trilogy Ensemble, The Choir of Royal Holloway, and Ligeti Quartet.

Receiving Second Prize for The Clements Prize for Composers 2025, he is determined to fight the ‘classical music’ stigma, offering a hand of reassurance to audiences who would otherwise be hesitant to discover new music.