Art Music Fund
Supporting new work that is innovative, displays professional compositional craft and represents a benchmark of excellence in its field.
Art Music Fund
2026 Art Music Fund applications have closed. Recipients will be announced in May 2026.
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How it works
We created the Art Music Fund, in partnership with the Australian Music Centre (AMC), SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music and Music Australia in recognition of the limited opportunities for art music composers to have new works performed. We strongly encourage the support of these partner organisations, who champion the work of art music composers, by becoming either an AMC Financial Member or a Friend of SOUNZ.
In 2026, 17 composers (15 from Australia, two from New Zealand) received a total pool of A$127,500 to create commissioned work that is complemented by an exploitation program. Each recipient receives a grant of A$7,500.
In February 2026 Music Australia became a funding partner, contributing an additional $45,000 to fund six more Australian composers - bringing the total number of Australian positions to 15 (up from 9).
The fund exists to commission new work that is innovative, displays professional compositional craft and represents a benchmark of excellence in its field.
To be considered, your work must have committed partners to ensure the work is presented multiple times with the intention to create a long artistic life for the work and by extension, you, the composer.
The Art Music Fund is assessed by an external panel of musicians. With an aim to represent a complete view of the industry, we are particularly aware of ensuring the panel of experts includes diverse voices across culture, gender, geography, generation, and genre.
Applicants planning to use of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Māori, Pasifika or other indigenous cultural content (such as language, titles, traditional instrumentation, narratives or themes) from outside their own cultural heritage must supply supporting documentation that they have consulted with the appropriate communities (or mātanga reo / language and cultural advisors) and have obtained their permissions and support to use their cultural content and intellectual property.
The fund supports a wide range of music styles including notated composition; electroacoustic music; improvised music (including innovative, original jazz); sound art; installation sound; multimedia, web and film sound and music; and theatrical, operatic and choreographed music.
As an applicant, you will be asked to explain how your arts practice aligns with the qualities identified in the Art Music Fund (innovation, compositional craft, and excellence), regardless of style.
It is expected that you will collaborate with ensembles, orchestras, producers, recording companies, broadcasters, festivals and other parties to propose the writing of a work that will be guaranteed multiple exposures by way of performances, recordings, broadcasts or digital dissemination.
Please note: The Art Music Fund is not intended to support popular contemporary music, nor folk music.
If further clarification is required, please email [email protected].
How to apply
The Art Music Fund is a big application for a big project, so it’s best to get started as early as possible. Read the requirements thoroughly, and give yourself plenty of time to gather support material.
Membership requirements
Australian and New Zealand applicants must be members of APRA AMCOS. Learn about APRA AMCOS membership here. Australian applicants must also be members of the Australian Music Centre (AMC). Learn about AMC membership here.
Application form
The Art Music Fund application form (for both Australia and New Zealand) must be completed online via SmartyGrants. Please note that there are separate forms for Australian application and New Zealand applications, ensure you select the correct one.
Applicants need to provide:
- Applicant information
- Your proposed composition
- Your presentation plan
- Supporting material – a short biography, previous work, collaborators/partners
Please Note: You may only submit one Art Music Fund application per funding round. Previous recipients of the Art Music Fund are not eligible to apply until their previous application has been acquitted.
Application guidelines
Your application will be assessed on:
- Innovation (how the work develops the applicant’s practice)
- Excellence & compositional craft (the quality of the work)
- Viability (the viability of the proposed project)
- Reach & impact (the quality of the presentation and exposure plan)
Your application must incorporate both the creation of the composition and subsequent exploitation of it, extending its life and reach. Applicants will be expected to demonstrate partnerships between the composer and ensembles, performers, presenters, producers, recording companies etc.
Previous Recipients of the Art Music Fund
| 2025 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. |
| 2024 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Anna Liebziet | VIC | The new music composition weaves into an installation that includes visual elements in five parts: bones, ghosts, bells, bricks, and hair. As a First Nations artist and educator my pedagogical and creative manoeuvre of 'respectful empathy' inspires the music spanning personal and socio-cultural locations. |
| Cameron Deyell | VIC | ECHO will be created in an immersive offshore environment, with the ocean as a collaborator. The electro-acoustic work responds to ecological processes and will unfold through a creative development with movement artists at Dancenorth Australia before becoming a live performance work and an instrumental studio-recorded album. |
| Christine Pan | NSW | ‘The Parts We Give’ (TPWG) is a song-cycle of eight songs exploring the nuanced presentation of love of an immigrant Chinese family residing in Australia. For two voices, piano, and electroacoustics, TPWG will be premiered in Western Sydney with further Australian and international performances to follow in 2025-2026. |
| Dominik Karski | WA | The work will be scored for two double basses and written for ELISION soloists Kathryn Schulmeister and Rohan Dasika. Indivisibility will essentially be about two similar yet distinct voices striving to attain a state of complete, perfect unity and certainty. The inspiration came from the Planck length (the smallest unit of length in quantum physics). |
| Emily Sheppard | TAS | Emily will write a cross-genre suite exploring the wide-ranging myths of sirens. The suite will feature bespoke kelp and eel-skin instruments and marine field recordings, written for the unique sound-world of the Van Diemen’s Fiddles. |
| Eve de Castro-Robinson | NZ | Earth’s eye, for clarinet, violin, viola and cello. The title is from a quote of Thoreau, “A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” It is appropriate, given the physical setting of Wanaka and surroundings, and gives scope to look inward, to create a sonic statement of depth, reflectiveness, and vivid colour. |
| James Rushford | VIC | Composing and presenting ‘Love Knots’, a new work for quarter-tone bass flute, contrabass and Lumatone microtonal keyboard, performed by Rebecca Lane, Jon Heilbron and Rushford. It explores the possibility of ‘3D’ harmony through an innovative score system. It will be performed across Europe and Australia in 2025. |
| Mindy Meng Wang / Monica Lim | VIC | Opera for the Dead (OFT) is a multi-artform musical performance for AsiaTOPA 2025, inspired by rituals and beliefs surrounding ancestor worship, death and afterlife in Chinese and Chinese diaspora culture. It combines live music performance , new/digital media and physical installation to create a participatory contemporary experience of grief, reflection and healing process. |
| Nathaniel Otley | NZ | this rising tide, these former wetlands will be a new chamber orchestra work for the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra and the Southbank Sinfonia that explores the ecological and cultural histories of former wetlands areas in both Aotearoa and the UK; finding and voicing how the echoes of these complex histories continue to resonate today. |
| Peter Knight | VIC | Reality Hunger is a suite of compositions for trumpet, electronics, ondes Martenot, and string quartet in collaboration with French ondes Martenot virtuoso, Nadia Ratsimandresy. The compositions will respond to sections of author David Shields’ influential work of literary collage, Reality Hunger, and will incorporate electroacoustic techniques, field recording, traditional scoring, and studio practice. |
| Sia Ahmad | ACT | I will be working on a song cycle for voice, string quartet and electronics to perform live with The Letter String Quartet (TLSQ). Inspired by contemporary classical, spiritual jazz and modern R'n'B forms, this new work explores the theme of gender identity and faith, directly inspired by my lived experience. |
| 2023 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Andrew Ford | NSW | I Sing the Birth will be a piece for treble voices and electric guitar, written for Luminescence Children's Choir, the Flanders Boys Choir, the Estonian TV Girl's Choir and others. It is a Christmas celebration with words ranging from the 15th century to today, and from Europe to Australia. |
| Aviva Endean | VIC | The Cloud Maker will generate a concert length work, inspired by goddesses from Maori, Korean, Nordic, Jewish, Celtic and Filipino cultures. Using the personal and universal themes that arise from these shared stories, The Cloud Maker will develop refined sonic worlds for their improvisations, which capture the magnitude of these archetypal tales. |
| Brooke Green | NSW | Brooke's third great-grandmother spent her last years ‘senile’ at the Newington Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women. She was transported from Limerick, Ireland to NSW in 1835 for her first offence: stealing calico. When Limerick-based harpsichordist Dr Yonit Kosovske asked Brooke to compose a new work for baroque violin, bass viol and harpsichord, this story came to mind. |
| Connor D'Netto | QLD | In collaboration with Divisi Chamber Singers, pianist Coady Green, and award-winning Australian writer and playwright Maeve Marsden, Connor is adapting stories from Marsden’s 'Queerstories' into a new song-cycle, for eight voices and piano. |
| Elizabeth Jigalin | NSW | 'Earbuds' is a five-movement work composed for five exceptional percussion/flute duos from across Australia and overseas. The work will showcase the unique artistic identities of each ensemble and incorporate them into the work’s character and direction. 'Earbuds' will convey through music the joy, intimacy and dynamism of living music practice, play and experimentation. |
| Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung | VIC | This project speculates a Chinese-Australian sonic history, using experimental archival sound technologies and historical tunings. Composer/erhu player Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung will lead this project with a team of collaborators, reimagining the collection of Chinese musical instruments, recordings and artefacts held at the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo. |
| Nadia Freeman | NZ | Nadia Freeman intends to honour her ancestors using electronic instrumental music, live sampling, song and theatre to tell the relatively unknown history of the 60,000 indentured labourers who were taken from India to Fiji by dishonest means and the inhumane conditions that befell them. |
| Netanela Mizrahi | NT | A new work, initially planned between long-term collaborators, Ms Mizrahi and Mr Gurruwiwi, supported by the Darwin Symphony Orchestra and chorale was to build on duo’s success as The Djari Project. In the week prior to the announcement of this commission, Mr Gurruwiwi tragically passed away. That collaboration now becomes an intimate work honouring exchange, loss and regeneration. |
| Salina Fisher | NZ | ‘Papatūānuku’ is a major new work for taonga pūoro and orchestra, in collaboration with Jerome Kavanagh and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and will be performed 24 August. The piece celebrates the unique voices of taonga pūoro and their deep connection with the natural world, honouring Papatūānuku (earth mother) in interaction with imaginative orchestral textures. |
| Victoria Pham | France/NSW | 'An Old Belief' is a song cycle composed by Victoria Pham for mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and cellist Daniel Pini. The work will set six of poet Alexander Cigana’s poems to music. 'An Old Belief' will be premiered as part of the 2024 European-Australian Chamber Music Festival (EACHmf Festival) in France. |
| Will Guthrie | France | The project comprises the creation, recording and presentation of new electro-acoustic works for drums, percussion, field recordings and electronics, under the title 'People Pleaser Part III’. These works will be performed live, and will be presented as Guthrie's first completely electro-acoustic live set, combining live drums / percussion and electronics. |
| 2022 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Cat Hope | VIC | 'A Slow Emergency' is a large scale work produced by Chamber Made. The work is devised by theatre director Adena Jacobs, composer Cat Hope and Chamber Made Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick, in conversation with a core team of teenage artist/activists as a response to the school climate strike movement. The work is equal parts funeral dirge and shimmering fantasy; choral chaos and dark energy; elation, contemplation and hope. |
| Corrina Bonshek | QLD | 'The space between us…' is a live performance installation for roaming audience and a spatialised ensemble who activate the sonic environment of highly reverberant space. To be presented in Australia in 2022 and in Portugal in 2023 with celebrated percussionist Luis Bittencourt. |
| Hamed Sadeghi | NSW | 'Empty Voices' is a world-class fusion of Persian Classical Music, Jazz and improvisation featuring the tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi along with Australian Jazz figures and emerging artists. Inspired by the notion of purity, love, liberty inherent to the Persian Sufism philosophy, a school of thought encompassing mysticism which has often influenced Middle Eastern artists. |
| Kate Milligan | WA | Kate will create a new work for Renaissance flute and electronics. The work will be performed by Australian early music specialist Jonty Coy (NL) on a unique replica of a sixteenth-century flute recently discovered by archaeologists on a Dutch shipwreck. |
| Linda Kouvaras | VIC | The multi-movement 'Herring Island Piano Sonata' will be a collaboration between composer Linda Kouvaras, pianist Coady Green, writer N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs of the Boon Wurrung Foundation, narrator Tiriki Onus, Head of the Wilin Centre, University of Melbourne, and sound designer Roger Alsop, in an audio tapestry of piano, soundscape and narration. |
| Maree Sheehan | NZ | The Song(s) of Solomon Project is a multi-disciplinary arts and music project that seeks to explore and respond to the profound and extensive layers of Ralph Hotere’s and Cilla McQueen’s work ‘Song of Solomon’. This project invites 14 Māori composers to create waiata, spoken word, sonic soundscape, rap, poetry to music either individually and or collaboratively to produce and record 14 sonic works that respond to the 14 panels of the ‘Song of Solomon’ for future exhibitions. |
| Paul Clift | Switzerland | Paul's new piece, for flute, clarinet, accordion, violin, cello and electronics, will be entitled 'State of Matter'. It will use hydrophone recordings of the audible, sustained vibrations that occur as icebergs rub against one another or the ocean floor, or as they break apart—so-called “iceberg songs”—as the basis of the electronics and to generate some of the instrumental material. |
| Riki Neihana Gooch | NZ | Riki is working towards developing a vocabulary of conducting directives for an ensemble of Tāonga Pūoro players that is an extension of the ‘Conduction’ method, developed by the late Butch Morris. This methodology is the intersection of composed music and improvisation. The aim is to find a Māori voice within the conduction practice and to document the process by way of a recorded performance. |
| Robert Curgenven | Ireland | New works for pipe organ commissioned by Richard Thomas Foundation (UK) to be realized at the Orgelpark Amsterdam and an electronic version at MONOM Berlin’s 48 speaker spatial soundsystem. These new works will use specific approaches to tonality and overtones focusing on air pressure control, sculpting timbre and tuning (intonation). |
| Ross McHenry | SA | 'For Six Hands and Six Synthesisers' is a major new work by multi-award-winning composer Ross McHenry for three acoustic pianos, six Modular Synthesisers and tape delay. The work uses post-minimalist compositional ideas alongside modular synthesiser compositional concepts to create a unique new chamber music work that will premiere in late 2022. |
| Wally Gunn | VIC | The new work will be a narrative-driven 75-minute oratorio for six voices, based on themes of dystopias, space travel, and evolution. |
| 2016 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Sandy Evans | NSW | Sandy's Bridge of Dreams is a major international collaborative work for 17-piece big band, Hindustani quartet (voice, harmonium, two tabla players) and saxophone soloist. This 70-minute work celebrates the creative dialogue between an exceptional group of musicians from Australia and India. |
| Alexander Garsden | VIC | Commissioned by Speak Percussion, Alexander Garsden will compose two new works totalling 40 minutes: tolle lege, tolle lege for percussion quartet and electronics, and Alfa Canvas, after Agnes Martin for solo percussion and electronics. |
| Samuel Holloway | NZ | Samuel received funding to write a new work for piano trio, to be performed by NZTrio. |
| Cat Hope, Mark Oliveiro and Meg Travers | WA/NSW | Decibel commissioned three new works by Cat Hope, Mark Oliveiro and Meg Travers for the Electric Concerto program at the Totally Huge New Festival in Western Australia. |
| James Hullick | VIC | CityTopias is a suite of four new works composed by James Hullick for the BOLT Ensemble (octet) that will tour Asia and be presented at JOLT’s Horrific Sapiens Festival in November 2017. |
| Lisa Illean | London/NSW | Lisa received funding to create new work Cantor for an ensemble (soprano and acoustic instruments). |
| Liza Lim | VIC | Liza received a grant to compose a 40 minute work for the internationally renowned Klangforum Wien, scored for 14 musicians. |
| Matthias Schack-Arnott | VIC | Matthias received a grant to create an ambitious new solo percussion work, Field Sever Points, featuring an expansive kinetic percussion instrument. |
| Dan Thorpe | SA | Dan workshopped and premiered [ false cognate ] for bass flute and electric guitar/viola at the highSCORE festival in Pavia, Italy. |
| Erkki Veltheim | VIC | Erkki received funding to compose 60 minute audiovisual work The Ganzfeld. |
