With the Gramophone Awards just over a week away, Colin Matthews, composer and NMC Executive Producer, recalls the unique background to last year's Contemporary Award winner, the NMC Songbook. (And there's still time to win a copy – and a signed score of one of the songs! Read on to find out how.)

Putting together the Gramophone Award-winning Songbook (a selection of newly-commissioned songs on the theme of Britain by UK composers) was quite the craziest project NMC has yet undertaken. Nearly 100 composers and 30 performers took some organiSing, but we were delighted with the results, and to have them recorded and then performed at a series of concerts in Hall One at Kings Place was really the icing on the cake.

To follow that we enhanced our brand new website with the NMC Music Map, an innovative but near impossible undertaking which attempts to categorise all the composers recorded on NMC together with their influences and teachers – this time we had over 400 composers to consider! So the Songbook Map is something simple by comparison – placing all the songs composed for the Songbook in their appropriate locations on a brightly coloured map of the UK.

Looking at it, I'm not surprised that there's something of a traffic jam in the South of England, but there's a good geographical spread, as the criterion for locating the pins you see on the map is by no means always the place where the composer lives or works, but can relate to the poem or text set as well. So furthest west on the mainland is Michael Finnissy, who may live in Sussex but whose song is set in Cornwall; London-based Rupert Bawden takes the prize for furthest north with Loch Lurgainn, in the Highlands.

Both these composers are part of 'the Gramophone ten', chosen for the competition that Gramophone are currently running on their website and picked both for their diversity of style and geographical spread. Which one's my favourite? Of course I'm not telling – not just because it would be invidious to make a choice, but because every song we recorded became special as it happened. It was a wonderful thing to be part of – perhaps our next competition should be for suggestions for NMC's next mad venture?

To enter the NMC Songbook Map competition for your chance to win a signed score by the composer with the most votes plus five runner-up prizes of the 4-disc Songbook boxset click here.