The AFCM (Arizona Friends of Chamber Music) is 60 years old and based in Tucson, Arizona.

We have had a long tradition of including a contemporary work in practically every one of our concerts. As a result, we have an exceptionally open-minded, attentive and warm audience (which practically every visiting musician or group of musicians comment on).

However, the works included were mostly drawn from the first half of the 20th century and precious few later ones composed between 1945 and 1980. This was because of our feeling that a lot of these later works were non-melodic, formless, discordant, thorny and forbidding. In other words, we felt that the "avant-garde" works, perhaps justified on an experimental, academic basis, were all too often certain to chase even our adventuresome audience away from the concert hall. And indeed, classical music audiences have dropped, and the number of young people attending those concerts has dropped considerably (for other reasons as well, of course).

Then, in the '80s, we started perceiving a change. A breath of fresh, exciting air! Back to tonality, melody (in a very broad sense of the term), and a strong feeling of form and structure, and yet decidedly original and contemporary. Not at all a rehash of post-romanticism.

That is when we decided we wanted to be part of what we felt was a real renaissance in the art of Chamber Music composing. As James Reel put it in the Arizona Daily Star, the AFCM "developed a frontier mentality", not related to Arizona's history and geography, but to the chamber music of today. We wanted, he continued, to help the composers "fray the edge of the chamber music envelope." And thus we started our commissioning program in 1995. The first commissioned work was world premiered
on February 26, 1997.

We gathered information from multiple sources: musicians, audience members, agents, and an ad in the American Composers Forum newsletter (which yielded 114 responses). Three of our board members who were most interested in the project formed a committee to evaluate all applications. (They are astronomer Helmut Abt, philosophy professor Joseph Tolliver and myself, a radiologist. It is perhaps of some interest that none of us can read a note.)

We approach the selection in consideration of the position each new piece would occupy in our season. For works commissioned to be premiered during our Evening Series of concerts, we start by choosing the composer, and then ask him/her to propose an ensemble of musicians he/she would like to work with. For our Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival (early March), we have an established group of musicians to start with, without flexibility in that respect. So we ask them to propose a composer. For our emerging artists series ("Piano and Friends"), we start either way. Needless to say, flexibility has to be built in, and a lot of hard work is put into the selection of both composers and musicians.

Our overriding concern is to present new music that would please yet challenge our sophisticated audience, and be attractive to new members too, including younger people. We want to bring people back-or welcome them for the first time-to the concert hall. We want them to find out that there is terrific chamber music composed today. We want them to feel the excitement of being part of this Chamber Music renaissance.

During the first ten years of our commissioning program, between 1997 and 2007, we have premiered 33 new pieces, and we have contracts for 8 more through the 2009-2010 season, for a total of 41 pieces. They range from a piano sonata to several quintets and a piece for seven instruments. We generally concentrate on young and upcoming composers, or older ones who we feel deserve more recognition. So far, we have not had a single mediocre piece. Several have been truly outstanding and significant additions to the repertoire. All have been well received. In fact, several have received enthusiastic standing ovations such that we had never witnessed for a contemporary piece. It must be underlined that this has been possible only because of our close communication with our audience and our tradition of progressive programming.

Then there is the question of the composer's fee. Commissions cost us between $2,000 and $15,000, depending on the composer's age, fame, type of work, length (there is a slightly disturbing tendency to charge so many dollars per minute, as if we were dealing with slices of salami). We have learned that it is important to specify not only a minimum length (for us, 12 minutes) on which we base the fee, but also a maximum length (for us, 20 minutes). Otherwise, there is a risk of getting pieces that are definitely too long for our purpose. For one work, by composer Richard Danielpour, we are co-presenters with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Chamber Music Northwest. For another one, by composer Ellen Zwilich, we organized a small consortium of four chamber music societies (AFCM, Detroit Chamber Music Society, and Fontana Arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan State University). All other works have been entirely commissioned by AFCM.

Other chamber music societies commission occasional new pieces, but, as we understand it, mostly when they have access to some grant program (national, regional or local) or a corporate sponsor, radio stations, etc. (this is particularly true in Europe). A lot of commissioning is done by musicians and composers.

As a consequence of our close contact with our audience, it occurred to us early and naturally to ask individual audience members to become personally involved in our commissioning program by sponsoring (i.e., underwriting) a specific piece. The response has been extraordinary: ALL 41 our past and future commissions over 12 years (1997 to 2009-2010) have been sponsored by our audience (with the exception of one piece at the very beginning)! Most sponsorship has been by individuals or couples, some by small groups (such as "members of the Czech community of Tucson" or "members of the Arizona Senior Academy" or "Lovers of Song"), some by friends, others as a memorial, or by estates. The names of the sponsors appear, of course, in our programs, but also on the piece's score and on CD inserts if a CD of it are produced (as has been the case for several works).

All composers are invited to participate in the final rehearsals and the premiere of their new piece, in Tucson, and are introduced to the audience, which has much appreciated this opportunity to meet a living composer. This is quite thrilling for all, including young audience members and those who attend rehearsals during the festival and witness the interaction between composer and musicians. The composers are also invited to have a seminar with the students of the composition department of the University of Arizona School of Music.

A display has been set up in the lobby of our concert hall showing pictures of all our composers, date of premiere, type of piece, musician(s) involved, names of sponsors, or listing availability and cost of sponsorship. It makes for a fascinating gallery and generates quite a lot of interest.

We are told repeatedly by musicians touring through Tucson that they have no knowledge of any other chamber music society in the U.S. or in Europe with a similar commissioning program: functioning on a regular basis, with such a significant number of commissions, and with sponsorship entirely by the audience, without any outside source of funding. For the AFCM, it has been the natural outgrowth of the very close relationship we have always cultivated with our audience. They are fully aware of the risk involved-the commissioned works can't all turn out to be masterpieces, they won't all become a staple of the repertoire-but they also know that we exercise extreme care in the selection process and devote a lot of hard work to it. They understand that "this is the way many enduring masterpieces come into the world, and that they can leave behind something for the generations to follow," as Dan Buckley put it in the Tucson Citizen. It is their shot at immortality, or, at least, their opportunity to be exposed to what is going on today in chamber music, to participate in it through sponsorship, and so to help shape it for the future. We cannot emphasize enough how truly extraordinary and generous our audience is for making possible such a significant contribution to tomorrow's chamber music. We hope that other chamber music societies will be inspired to join the effort and improve on it.