🏆 Tunescribers Arranging Competition 2025 – Winners Announced! 🏆
After weeks of listening, deliberating, and celebrating the creativity of arrangers from around the world, we’re thrilled to announce the winners of the Tunescribers Arranging Competition 2025!
🥇 1st Place: Kurt Bestor
Prize: $500 cash and a NotePerformer license
Judges’ comments:
- Martin Keary (Tantacrul): Intriguing opening and very nice ending… very consistent and satisfying
- Ben Rauhala: Stunning to play, stunning to hear. Beautiful without being difficult. Very clearly and expressively notated. Bonus points for the “like a whisper” notation at the end. Loved this!
- Peter Davison: Beautiful. Really very very musical, and just works in its simplest form. Nothing overtly complicated, just very considered and musical
- Joe Beighton: Beautifully simple. Very cohesive, unified and well assembled. I’m a big fan of the harmonisation… unpretentiously stunning arrangement
🥈 2nd Place: Dan Wanamaker
Prize: $100 Tunescribers transcription credit and a perpetual Cantai license
Judges’ comments:
- Martin Keary (Tantacrul): Impressive harmonic creativity. Consistent, with a refreshing take on the mood. Very pianistic, very good presentation and engraving.
- Ben Rauhala: Beautiful, particularly in the second half. Doesn’t feel as much like the original song often-times, but I found it lovely.
- Peter Davison: This is very clever… clearly a very skilled musician here. It’s bitonal, but very very well thought out.
- Joe Beighton: A great take on the brief. The harmonisation is really interesting if a little incohesive at times. The furieux section feels a bit out of place, but rhythmically and voicing-wise it’s a brilliant bit of music.
🥉 3rd Place: Fred Grigg
Prize: $50 Tunescribers transcription credit and a perpetual Graphical MIDI Tools license
Judges’ comments:
- Martin Keary (Tantacrul): Rhythmically strong. A player could have fun with this and really make it shine.
- Ben Rauhala: Star quality in spades. A bold, well-notated re-interpretation. While not the most sight-readable of all difficulty-wise, it’s written out clearly to be achievable with practice.
- Joe Beighton: It’s exciting to hear such a different take… a brilliant piece and exciting to listen to/play.
🎖 Honourable Mentions
- Georgia Seddon
- David Perkins
🗳 Audience Favourite: David Perkins
Prize: A professionally recorded piano performance video of the arrangement (subject to playability)
🙏 Thank You!
A huge thank you to all of the talented entrants who made this competition so special. We were blown away by your creativity, skill, and musicality.
Thank you to our esteemed panel of judges – Martin Keary (Tantacrul), Ben Rauhala, Peter Davison, and Joe Beighton – for lending their expertise and thoughtful feedback.
And of course, thank you to our generous sponsors – NotePerformer, Cantai, and Graphical MIDI Tools – for supporting new music and making these prizes possible!
We can’t wait to do this again – see you next time!
