The Ivors Classical Awards aren’t simply about trophies. They’re also an indication of how one part of the classical music industry sees itself: noble, embattled, and possibly faintly addicted to the romance of struggle. Earlier this week at the BFI, that story was heard again — with a new plot twist.
The 2025 Ivors Classical Awards were staged at London’s BFI on Tuesday this week. The event celebrated the newest of compositions premiered over the past twelve months, in addition marking lifetime achievements for film and TV composers Anne Dudley and Debbie Wiseman, and composer, sitarist and innovator Anoushka Shankar.
Composer Helen Grime’s Folk for soprano and orchestra secured the Best Orchestral Composition award. Folk was premiered on 26 September in Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and soprano Claire Booth, and later featured in this year’s Aldeburgh Festival.
Other notable wins saw Chilean composer Aníbal Vidal awarded Best Chamber Ensemble Composition for Invocación N.2: A Kintsugi Resurrection — a win too for Britten Sinfonia, whose Magnum Opus series composer development programme saw Vidal participate and the work created on it premiered last year.
Composer Anna Clyne’s Orbits, commissioned and performed by The Sixteen with Harry Christophers, won Best Choral Composition alongside an impressive set of other nominees including Bernard Hughes for Hear My Heart Sing, Julian Anderson for Nothing at All, and Ruby Colley’s profoundly moving work inspired by and co-created with her nonverbal brother Paul.
The chamber orchestra and electronics work Finding Gills [When They Try to Drown You] by composer Nneka Cummins was, in a similar vein to Vidal’s win, was an indicator of how commissioner, production house, and concert promoter nonclassical has secured its place in the UK classical-music industry too. It also raises the profile of the orchestra who premiered the work, Sinfonia Smith Square, validating its recent rebranding of the Westminster venue formerly known as St John’s Smith Square.
The wider impact of these awards — illustrated by the orchestras, ensembles, and publishers involved — helps contextualise a genre often misrepresented in wider discourse. The network of commissions and collaborations on display shows both the fragility and the vibrancy of the classical ecosystem: an art form sustained by risk, trust, and a stubborn faith in creation itself.
Taken as a whole, this year’s Ivors also hint at the preoccupations of composers over the past few years (not all of the works are written the same year they’re premiered).
Lisa Illean’s arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, like Cassandra Miller’s Chanter in the Best Chamber Ensemble Composition category, explores memory. John Casken and Vidal’s Invocación from the same category create a sensory experience that acts as a foil for the harsh volatility its audience might be experiencing today. Likewise, in the Best Choral Composition category, Julian Anderson’s Nothing at All, Bernard Hughes’ Hear My Heart Sing, and Ruby Colley’s Hello Halo share a sense of music being channelled to either reflect or evoke joy. In Nneka Cummins’ Finding Gills — an exploration of resilience — and Robin Haigh’s trumpet concerto for Matilda Lloyd, LUCK, there are themes of joy and familial love. Creatives seem moved by a universally fractured human response to an equally fractured and embattled world.
As an event, the awards ceremony is a necessary process even if they’re not especially gripping to watch. Composition award winners don’t know in advance who’s won, meaning there is some jeopardy for those of us who follow the fortunes of unsung classical-music heroes. The Ivors’ value is to be found in the way they surface names — their inclusion on the nomination list the consequence of composers’ peers selecting them. In this way, it’s peers recognising peers: a qualitative statement, and a handy list of who to look out for in any given year and the years to come.
Yet if you’re not a composer, an agent, or a publisher, they also act as an interesting barometer for the preoccupations of the industry. In two welcome speeches from Ivors Academy Chair Tom Gray and Julian Nott from PRS Members Council, we got an impression of the way in which composers see themselves in terms of their struggles and the threats they’re facing. Tom Gray made a characteristic, dry bid for connection from the assembled audience by highlighting the ongoing challenge composers experience getting paid for their work — you’re part of the tribe if, like most freelancers, you struggle to get your invoices paid on time.
From Gray, the reminders that “Art is how we survive” and “Music doesn’t just arrive” had a whiff of preaching to the choir. Julian Nott positioned PRS as the knight in shining armour, not only securing an 8 percent increase in royalties distributed in the past twelve months, but pointing to the £50 million in grants its charity arm, PRS Foundation, has awarded composers and songwriters since its inception 25 years ago. The third key message was the proud announcement of a policy commitment not to pay out royalties to a machine or its owner for music generated by AI — surely a good thing all round.
It’s disappointing that artists are framed as struggling. The struggle is real, and the framing builds connection, but is there a more front-footed, future-focused way of advocating the act of creativity? In this regard, it was good to hear from Nott that human endeavours powered by AI do constitute acceptable use, but is the rhetoric in danger of demonising the technology and polarising thought? Is perpetuating the binary argument that art is good, technology bad, simply fuelling intellectual laziness?
(This article is being written on an iPad Pro — the same model Apple advertised in May 2024 by crushing musical instruments and paints in a hydraulic press, prompting outrage from creatives who felt the campaign dismissed the value of craft in favour of frictionless technology.)
We might have expected a more nuanced, permissive articulation of how the technology can support a creative generation — to speak of opportunity rather than simply threat. Would it have been more daring to honour the intellectual curiosity in the room — the very same curiosity and rigour you’d expect a room full of creatives to feed off for their art? Possibly, though that may well have deadened the atmosphere and resulted in the ceremony’s radio recording not being quite as upbeat as Radio 3 would have been hoping for.
Who will dare to be first in acknowledging the AI tools they use day-to-day in the creative process, given that PRS will happily pay out royalties for those who use it ‘acceptably’? Who will dare risk exclusion from the tribe? Will there be a point in time when a composer wins an Ivor who has used it in the creation of their award-winning work? Will the Ivors Academy require composers to declare whether they have or haven’t used it? Will any of us even be able to tell?
