In the eyes of tenor Nicholas Phan, living composers and the classical music genre of art song both face a similar obstacle: they’re often overlooked when it comes to programming and promoting classical music.

“You have these pieces of music that are part of you, part of your DNA, and every time you return to them, it just comes out differently because you are different.”

Over the span of just 9 months, Philadelphia Orchestra went from being one of the least representative orchestras of women composers to being the most.

Despite shifting tides, especially since the rise of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements in 2017, women are often left out of the spotlight when it comes to leadership roles in film and music production.

Missy Mazzoli is a composer who is inspired by “weird stories,” and that’s a good thing. Her fascination with “humans who support, undermine, and love each other” has paved the way for opportunities in nearly every realm of the music industry. She is one of two women composers commissioned to write an opera for the Metropolitan Opera in New York …

Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti has appointed Missy Mazzoli as the orchestra’s new Mead Composer-in-Residence. Mazzoli will write a new work for the CSO, to be performed during the 2019-2020 season, and she will curate the orchestra’s Music Now concert series, plus give guidance for the programming of other contemporary music by the orchestra. Mazzoli’s compositions include two …

Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Irene Britton Smith, Nora Holt, and countless other women of color contributed to the Chicago Black Renaissance and changed classical music around the world.

Guèbrou combined the musical traditions of St. Yared, the father of Ethiopian religious music, with classical piano and the traditional pentatonic scales of Ethiopian music.

The extraordinary story of Hildegard von Bingen.

If you’re looking to expand your own repertoire, why not explore the music of living composers? Check out these 10 composers changing contemporary classical music today who also all happen to be women.

During March, Women’s History Month, we draw special attention to the music of women composers past and present on WFMT. Here are 10 living composers who are changing music today, along with 10 albums featuring their music you might want to add to your library.

“I wrote Ex Patria in 2011 to honor the 19,336 victims of homicide that year in Venezuela.”

Judges described Wolfe’s work, Anthracite Fields, as a “powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.”