Judith Weir, Patron of the competition, writes: "A huge amount of the music and songs ever written have been written about Love. But classically trained composers from the twentieth century onward seem on the whole to have avoided the subject. Music of this period, great though it may be, has often centred around alienation, anxiety, loss – and understandably so.

We wondered – if we invited composers around the world to send us Love Songs written for piano solo, would they respond, and how? What aspects of this emotion would they be responding to, and would we be able to tell what it was by playing and hearing the music? We also wondered if a new young generation would have different responses, hence our inclusion of an under-25 category.