2025 Art Music Fund recipients announced

The 11 recipients of the 2025 Art Music Fund have been announced today by APRA AMCOS, in partnership with the Australian Music Centre and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music.

The Fund grants $82,500 in support to 11 composers (nine from Australia, two from New Zealand) to create a commissioned work.

The composers are Biddy Connor, Cayn Borthwick, Katy Abbott, Leah Curtis, Mace Francis, Megan Clune, Phoebe Bognar, Rafael Karlen, Thomas Meadowcroft, Dylan Lardelli and Tatiana Riabinkina.

Biddy Connor. Photo © Bryony Jackson

Violist and composer Biddy Connor‘s Song to the Cell places a beeping, whirring  IV machine in duet with a vocalist  to explore ideas of “healing, dependency and transhuman connection”

“The Art Music Fund is crucial because it champions ambitious, innovative and often genre-defying contemporary music that might otherwise lack dedicated backing,” said Connor. “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 realised.”

Cayn Borthwick‘s new multimedia performance work Cryoswell will be performed by Rubiks Collective. Sonifying both environmental and human data, the work features “bespoke ice instruments, surround sound and visuals of glaciers” in an investigation into the climate and impermanence.

For New Zealand composer Dylan Lardelli, the fund provides “invaluable space to reflect on my artistic concerns, undertake points of research and create my work uninterrupted”.

Lard work will be composed for Swiss group Ensemble Mondrian and explore ideas of “musical imprint and retrieval”, and explore threads of the fogginess of memory and dream states. Lardelli was also a recipient of the Fund in 2017.

Katy Abbott. Photo © Pia Johnson

Melbourne-based composer Katy Abbott will write a one-performer show for cellist Zoe Knighton called Hidden Thoughts: Wild Creature. Abbott’s Hidden Thoughts series, which uses responses from the public, includes three chamber works, the latest of which was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2024 during her Composer in Residence role.

Leah Curtis‘s The Forest is a three-part immersive work for string orchestra or quintet, ‘evoking ancient forests and shimmering light’.

Leah Curtis. Photo © Aimee Westcott.

WA-based composer and bandleader Mace Francis will compose and orchestrate four new works with Whadjuk educator and musician Vaughn McGuire in Noongar language. McGuire’s lyrics will feature both traditional and modern stories, and the works will be performed and recorded.

With the support, NSW composer and artist Megan Alice Clune develops a durational composition that explores the “chain of references, associations and connections contained within sound” and how it can shift and corrupt over time and repetition.

Now based in Basel, Switzerland, flautist and composer Phoebe Bognár will write in time, a five-episode. semi-staged work for quartet, text and electronics about the fear and bravery in imagining the future.

Jazz composer and saxophonist Rafael Karlen, also living in Basel, receives the Fund to develop his work The Dying Art of Discourse for jazz orchestra, exploring the “polarisation [and] digital hostility” flooding modern online dialogue. Preceding a 2026 album launch, the work will be performed both interstate and internationally.

New Zealand bassist-composer Tatiana Riabinkina’s celebratory work Two New Years of Aotearoa engages both taonga pūoro and cello soloists in a “shared musical journey of friendship and collaboration” between Māori and Pākehā traditions.

Berlin-based Australian composer Thomas Meadowcroft will write a new work for the NY-based JACK Quartet entitled Mediums, which will premiere at 92NY in the ensemble’s 2026–27 season. The work pairs recordings of string synthesisers from the 70s and 80s with live string musicians in a delve into ideas around authenticity and originality.

More about the Art Music Fund can be found here.

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