2025 Art Music Fund recipients announced
11 art music composers have been awarded $7,500 grants for new projects
The 2025 Art Music Fund recipients are Biddy Connor, Cayn Borthwick, Dylan Lardelli, Katy Abbott, Leah Curtis, Mace Francis, Megan Alice Clune, Phoebe Bognar, Rafael Karlen, Tatiana Riabinkina and Thomas Meadowcroft
The Art Music Fund is a partnership of APRA AMCOS, the Australian Music Centre and SOUNZ
APRA AMCOS, in partnership with the Australian Music Centre (AMC) and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, has announced the 11 recipients of the 2025 Art Music Fund.
The Fund provides a total of AU$82,500 for 11 established composers, nine from Australia and two from Aotearoa New Zealand, to create commissioned work with the intention of ensuring a long artistic life for the work and its composer.
This year’s winners are Australians Biddy Connor, Cayn Borthwick, Katy Abbott, Leah Curtis, Mace Francis, Megan Alice Clune, Phoebe Bognar, Rafael Karlen and Thomas Meadowcroft, with New Zealand composers Dylan Lardelli and Tatiana Riabinkina making up the final 11.
The range of works being supported by this year’s Fund include song cycles, string quartets and jazz orchestras that explore a range of themes from climate change to cancer treatment and a celebration of the unique cultural diversity of New Zealand.
Melbourne-based composer, performer and arranger, Biddy Connor’s Song to the Cell transforms an IV machine into an instrument in this intimate performance. A vocalist and a medical device entwine in a unique duet of hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, exploring ideas of healing, dependency and transhuman connection.
She explains: “The Art Music Fund is crucial because it champions ambitious, innovative and often genre-defying contemporary music that might otherwise lack dedicated backing. It allows composers to take creative risks and develop original and artistic works. Without this support, many significant projects in art music would simply not be unrealised.”
New Zealand-based international composer, Dylan Lardelli’s work will be written for Swiss group - Ensemble Mondrian - and will be composed for violin, viola, cello and electronics.
He adds: “This grant will provide me with invaluable space to reflect on my artistic concerns, undertake points of research and create my work uninterrupted. It will permit me to engage with the fine performers involved in interpreting my work, allowing for a score that is idiomatic while still containing the elements of exploration that I value.”
The Art Music Fund was launched in 2016 in recognition of the limited opportunities for art music composers to have new works performed. It commissions new work, providing winning composers with professional support to grow their repertoire in a sustainable way. To date, it has provided over half a million dollars in funding to over 100 projects.
Previous winners have included Anna Liebzeit, Cat Hope, Christine Pan, Dominik Karski, Erkki Veltheim, Liza Lim, Mindy Meng Wang, Monica Lim and Nadia Freeman.
Chris O’Neill, Director of Creative Programs at APRA AMCOS, says: “The calibre of entries for this year’s Art Music Fund was incredible, and we’re thrilled to be able to announce such an impressive line-up of recipients for 2025. The Fund is a vital opportunity for established composers to get their works commissioned on a large scale and create longevity and exposure for a long time to come.”
Catherine Haridy, CEO of AMC, adds: “The Art Music Fund provides meaningful and lasting professional support for creators to explore bold artistic ideas and transform them into imaginative and impactful new works. The AMC is proud to be a partner of the Art Music Fund, and we warmly congratulate all 11 recipients for 2025.”
"SOUNZ is delighted to be able to collaborate with APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre,” concludes Hannah Darroch - Chief Executive, SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music | Toi te Arapūoru. “This opportunity is of huge value to our composers in Aotearoa, and it's wonderful to be able to support artistry and creative career sustainability through the Art Music Fund. Congratulations to all eleven recipients - what a huge range of innovative projects - and we look forward to hearing the musical results!"
2025 Art Music Fund recipients
| Composer | Location | Funded Work |
|---|---|---|
| Biddy Connor | VIC | Song to the Cell transforms an IV machine into an instrument in this intimate performance. A vocalist and a medical device entwine in a unique duet of hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, exploring ideas of healing, dependency and transhuman connection. |
| Cayn Borthwick | VIC | Cryoswell is new multimedia performance exploring climate, data, and sound through immersive sonification. Composed for Rubiks Collective, bespoke ice instruments, surround sound and visuals of glaciers, waves, and surfers, it transforms environmental and human data into a powerful reflection on impermanence, interconnection and the shifting forces of nature. |
| Dylan Lardelli | NZ | The work will be written for Swiss group - Ensemble Mondrian, and will be composed for violin, viola, cello and electronics. The work will call on Dylan's artistic interests of musical imprint and retrieval, and the path of dream, interlinking the unreliability of memory with interrogation into threshold and dream states. |
| Katy Abbott | VIC | Hidden Thoughts: Wild Creature will be a one-performer show composed for cellist Zoe Knighton. Like other works in the Hidden Thoughts Series, Wild Creature uses responses of the public (this time, looking at intuition alongside recent neuro-science research). The work bridges contemporary classical elements with theatrical elements. |
| Leah Curtis | INT | The Forest, for string orchestra (or quintet), will be an immersive new work, evoking ancient forests and shimmering light. Detailed string textures will be deeply anchored, free, wild, and expansive. Unfolding in three parts: Veil of Mist: Walk with Me, Forest Wayfinding: Rain and Petrichor, and Touch at a Distance: Rewilding. |
| Mace Francis | WA | Working with Vaughn McGuire to compose and orchestrate four new works based on and including his lyrics and voice in Noongar language. These lyrics are based on traditional stories as well as modern day stories. These new works will be orchestrated for a jazz orchestra line up and recorded for distribution. |
| Megan Alice Clune | NSW | Megan will create a durational composition that works with the repetition of melodic fragments over extended durations as a guiding compositional principle. She is interested in exploring the chain of references, associations and connections contained within sounds, and how repetition can morph or disrupt those conceptions. |
| Phoebe Bognar | INT | in time explores how we imagine the future amid uncertainty. Structured in five episodes for quartet, text and electronics, this semi-staged work delves into personal aspirations and anxieties about what lies ahead. in time is a piece about thinking out loud, where imagining the future becomes both an act of resilience and a window into personal and collective concerns and hopes. |
| Rafael Karlen | INT | The Dying Art of Discourse is an extended work for jazz orchestra exploring themes of post-truth, increasing polarization, digital hostility, echo chambers and the curation history. The composition will have interstate and international performances in 2026 leading an album release. |
| Tatiana Riabinkina | NZ | Two New Years of Aotearoa is an orchestral work celebrating New Zealand’s cultural diversity through taonga pūoro and cello soloists. Reflecting Matariki and the European New Year, the piece explores dialogue, respect and unity between Māori and Pākehā traditions, culminating in a shared musical journey of friendship and collaboration. |
| Thomas Meadowcroft | INT | Mediums - a new work for the Jack Quartet which will be premiered as part of the string quartet’s 2026-7 season at the The 92NY Center for Culture & Arts in New York City. The work for string quartet and electronics (pre-recorded string synthesisers from the 1970s and 1980s) explores differences between original and copy, the authentic and inauthentic, the real and the imaginary. |
