Maybe he's being blackmailed by orchestrators.

There are a variety of middle-roads between the fully stipendiary model and that of commissioning. One I quite like, and have been involved in the selection process for, is the idea of a 'proposal' for work - whether of general nature or towards a specific (and ultimately to be completed) piece. You invite proposals for a project (or programme of work), which may consist of verbal plans and/ or sketch work, and which of course can be submitted anonymously, and select on the bases of these, rather than a pre-existing work or reputation. Rare, but it's an interesting alternative.

 

Each form of support has its shortcomings; commissioning simply single pieces potentially leads to commodification and routine, but stipends alone, while offering freedom for production, might not lead to projects, connections to musicians etc. The best form of support, in my opinion, would be a stipend that was bound to specific compositional tasks with specific musicians. Something like Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart offers the potential for connections and projects, of course, but having a residency there doesn't guarantee any concrete results. Especially young composers with relatively little experience of rehearsing their pieces and trying things out with players would benefit from something like that, as opposed to just sponsorship to write at their desk.

the most reasonable sponsorship policy would be a set of schemes that supported pieces/projects/persons with varying time spans. public sector committees of the g&g etc make these kinds of decisions all the time. the problem is getting the dosh in the first place. and not just for music; painting drama dance poetry and the other arts are very worthwhile investments for a sane, cultivated and civil society.

this discussion could lead one to the inference that what makes a good piece of music is less to the point than how does one make a living composing such a 'piece'.

as a lay reader i am left with goodall's pantheon of Stravinsky, Cole Porter and Lennon&McCartney in the contemporary field because they wrote melodic and accessible music; this does not fit well with the fun i just had listening to a snippet of ian playing tracts 1 by richard! or my daughter playing mira by stephen montague (ta).

"... the heavenly love-child of Stockhausen and Tippett"

Nice. (Not sure whether I'm happy imagining the conception thereof.)

I was going to say something quite similar actually. I wasn't particularly aware of the stipend system in Holland (I know something similar operates in Ireland, involving a government stipend plus tax breaks, although as I understand it Bono is as much a beneficiary as Gerald Barry, which I suppose could be hard to argue with in theory but seems unfortunate in practice). But while it seems a very good idea, not least for the reason Richard and Ollie have both mentioned, that it can help to focus on creativity as a ongoing process (what Deleuze might have called an ongoing project of self-creation) rather than a finite one ending with a single product, I can also see how the sudden arrival of an unexpected commission, the new contacts it creates, the new trains of thought it sparks off, etc. are all positive things that are enabled by the current system. Unpredictability, of income and of attention, has its up-sides as well as it downs.

I suppose part of this is just that I know what sort of successful solutions composers adopt under the current system and don't (yet) know what solutions they'd find under a different system. It's not really an argument against change.

Is it just me or are my sentences getting longer recently? I hope it doesn't interfere too much with their comprehensibility. I might lose my stipend otherwise

I think that's not so much a local delicacy as a staple diet across the world in many professional contexts. But then commissions also tend to arise as a result of composers and/or their promoters either knowing people* or knowing how to talk the talk - it's just a bit more visible when the merde is on paper, as it were.
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*That's not to say people don't sometimes make their friends/professional connections based on admiring each other's work, rather than the other way round. Just that it's not always easy to know how such contacts arise.