Australia’s Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Martin Ollman.
In last Tuesday’s (3/10) Limelight (Australia), Maddy Briggs writes, “Tenth Muse Initiative has released its analysis of the diversity of 2025 Australian orchestral seasons. Looking at the representation of both female and male composers and living and historical composers over the year, soprano and producer Hannah Lee Tungate is ‘cautiously optimistic’ about this year’s findings, shared on the womenscomposersproject Instagram…. ‘Overall, works by women made up 14.6 percent of programming in 2025, an increase on 2024’s 11.9 percent after a dip from 13.2 percent in 2023,’ Tungate tells Limelight…. Tungate has found that in 2025, works by female composers were performed more often than works by Beethoven, Mozart and Bach altogether (12.5 percent)—which, for her, shows ‘both the progress being made and how entrenched the traditional canon still is.’… The Australian Chamber Orchestra commissioned five women in 2024, and increased it to 16 works by women in 2025—23.9 percent of its 2025 program were female-composed works, compared to 12.35 percent last year. Tungate’s picked it as a notable shift: ‘It will be interesting to see whether that reflects a longer-term programming shift or a one-year change.’ Last year, 35.8 percent of the ACO’s program was written by living composers.”
