Last year I embarked on a series of my own creative projects, most of which have emerged from my friendship with composer Stephen McNeff and his writings for me over the past few years. He has composed enough music for me to fill a CD and we were delighted when a small recording company agreed to support our project by underwriting the production and release costs of a CD, provided that we found the money to pay the artists involved. These amount to six players, a conductor, Steve’s time to attend the recordings and, of course, me.

I am lucky to have generous friends who would, if begged, probably do this work for very little money. But I want to be able to pay them a decent, if unexceptional, fee. Even these relatively small amounts add up and I am in the midst of raising around £4,000 to cover their costs.

The RVW and Finzi Trusts have pledged money, but that won’t be made available until the CD is pressed, so I’ll be covering their contribution from my own savings until I am reimbursed.

Today I researched a further twelve possible Trusts, of which all but three were immediate write-offs because of geography, ties to certain institutions, age limits, exclusion of recording projects, temporary freeze on giving due to restricted funds and so on.

I am applying as an individual where I am permitted to, but am also looking for ways round the problem of it being seen as only ‘my’ project. True, it is a career-development project for me, but also a vital marketing tool for the composer (despite his already considerable reputation) and, at a purely artistic level, music worthy of being committed to CD and shared more widely with classical music audiences.

Crowd-funding is a mechanism that seems to be finding favour at the moment and has worked for classical projects but I am reluctant to go down this route unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Were I to do so, I am pretty sure that most of the contributors to my war-chest would, in fact, be my colleagues in the profession. We spend a great deal of time, and what money we can, supporting each others’ work by attending each others’ performances and it seems wrong to ask the same people for a cash handout as well.

What does anyone else think? Have you used crowdfunding successfully? Did it generate funds from genuinely independent donors, or were they mostly friends and family who would have contributed anyway and spared you the 5% fee for using the crowdfunding mechanism?  We have to be increasingly creative about the ways in which we fund our projects – how to do this without exhausting the goodwill of our chief supporters?