We sometimes get panned for celebrating a particular city’s musical inheritance: eventually, the inheritance can become the entire story. The records remain magnificent. The mythology grows ever more marketable. Meanwhile, somewhere beyond the familiar soundtrack, somebody in that same location, is writing something nobody's heard before.
Three composers with Manchester connections have been nominated for the 2026 Ivors Composer Awards. Manchester-born Alex Paxton is shortlisted for Best Small-Scale Composition; Manchester-based Laura Bowler for Best Large-Scale Composition; and fellow Manchester resident Martin Suckling for Best Vocal and Choral Composition.
The geographical grouping is obviously useful. The differences between their works are much more interesting.
Here are an ensemble piece involving loudspeakers, an orchestral encounter with Han Kang’s writing, and an unaccompanied choral work commissioned by singers in Leeds to remember a friend. Together, they suggest how inadequate a single account of contemporary classical music can be. The field accommodates exuberance and bereavement, literary experiment and collective remembrance. Its materials include circuitry, breath, language and the physical effort of making sound together.
Paxton’s nominated work, Scrunchy Touch Sweetly to Fall (Kite and Finger Run), is written for 11 players and loudspeakers. The title alone puts some distance between its composer and the idea that musical seriousness requires an air of solemnity.
A composer and improvising trombonist, Paxton works across the boundaries that concert programming still finds convenient: composition and improvisation, acoustic instruments and electronic sound, the cultivated and the exuberantly unruly.
Those boundaries are absolutely worth examining. An improviser’s knowledge is physical as well as theoretical: the resistance of an instrument, the timing of a gesture, the point at which an idea acquires momentum. Bringing that experience into written composition can make the score a place where different kinds of musical intelligence meet.
Paxton’s own account of his language gives melody a central role. Writing about his 2025 album Delicious, which includes music from the nominated work, he describes influences extending to video games, hyper-pop and the habits of internet culture. The record places instrumental writing alongside electronic textures and intricately detailed production.
That's a useful corrective to the assumption that adventurous composition has to reject the pleasures of a tune. Complexity can multiply those pleasures: a melody can remain a thread through a dense musical fabric, giving the ear something to follow while other activity presses around it.
Nor does “small-scale” mean modest in ambition. Eleven instrumentalists and loudspeakers offer considerable possibilities for contrast, density and colour. The category measures performing forces; it can't measure the size of an imagination.
The work’s commissioners - Ensemble Modern, impuls and Gaudeamus - also place this Manchester-born composer within an international network. Regional musical life has always depended on exchange. Its vitality's diminished when we describe it as self-contained.
Bowler’s The White Book approaches another expressive territory. Written for soprano and orchestra, it sets extracts from Han Kang’s book of the same name and was created for Barbara Hannigan.
Bowler, Deputy Head of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, works across concert music, opera and multidisciplinary performance. Here, the encounter with literature has a deeply personal origin. In her programme note for the London Symphony Orchestra, she recalls reading Han Kang beside her mother’s hospital bed during treatment for leukaemia. Her mother recovered, then subsequently died in an accident.
Han Kang’s meditation on white objects and the brief life of an older sister offered Bowler a language for feelings she struggled to articulate. The composition emerged from that relationship between another writer’s words and her own grief.
Her description of the scoring is incredibly revealing. The orchestra can extend the soloist’s expression; it can also become a force that overwhelms her. The voice moves between constrained inwardness and reaching out.
That relationship makes orchestration part of the work’s emotional argument. The distribution of sound carries meaning: how much space a voice has, what supports it, what threatens to engulf it. A large ensemble can make private feeling public while preserving the vulnerability of the individual at its centre.
The commission came from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and Copenhagen Philharmonic. Bowler’s position in Manchester belongs within that wider circulation of artists and ideas. Teaching, composing and international collaboration are connected activities, each capable of feeding the others.
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Suckling’s Songs of Sleep and Prophecy brings the story over the Pennines to Leeds.
The work was commissioned by Leeds Guild of Singers in memory of David Eaves, a former bass in the choir who died in 2020. A crowdfunding campaign and support from charitable funders helped make it possible. The singers gave its first performance under Benjamin Kirk at Holy Trinity Church, Leeds, in November 2025.
That history deserves a place beside the nomination. An existing group of singers decided that remembering somebody could involve adding something new to the repertoire.
Written for unaccompanied mixed choir, the piece alternates English-language prophecies with Gaelic lullabies. In his programme note, Suckling connects these apparently distant forms through their shared desire to bring a different future closer.
His description of the writing suggests how this idea becomes musical structure. Different vocal strands operate at different speeds, allowing several experiences of time to coexist. The lullaby’s intimacy sits beside the urgency and distance of prophecy.
Unaccompanied singing gives such writing a particular human exposure. Pitch, blend and continuity have to be sustained through the singers’ attention to one another. In a memorial commission, that collective responsibility acquires an additional resonance.
Here, a Northern choir is an active participant in the creation of contemporary culture. Its members and supporters have helped determine what music exists for others to sing. The work is utterly beautiful (if we're allowed to link an adverb and adjective so clumsily?)
The awards encompass nine categories this year, bringing concert composition into the same ceremony as music for film, television, video games, documentary and live performance. Winners are set to be announced in London on 17 November.
For us in the North, these three nominations offer an opportunity to look closely at the work and at the relationships behind it: a conservatoire where composers teach, international ensembles prepared to commission, a choir that raises money to remember a member through music.
Rlationships like this need time, expertise, rehearsal and trust. They make room for art whose shape can't be known in advance.
Paxton, Bowler and Suckling offer very different reasons for us to pay attention. The regional connection brings them into the same story; listening should allow each to lead us somewhere distinct.
A place’s musical culture lives through that continuing possibility. Somebody writes. Somebody commits to performing it. An audience encounters a sound it couldn't previously have imagined.
The North’s next musical inheritance is being made now.
Header image: Alex Paxton, Martin Suckling and Laura Bowler
