As a kid, Haeon Lee loved listening to the music her father played on the record player. Though she took piano lessons, she never imagined that she could be a composer behind such works. “No one around me had a connection to the classical music world,” said Lee, now 17.
At 8 years old, she started putting notes on the page and realized that she liked composing more than performing. Thankfully, living in New York City meant she had access to young musicians programs. However, finding a community of young female composers proved challenging. “I was the only one out of five composers in the program who was female,” she said. “Composing felt lonely, especially since it’s more solitary than performing.”
Going into her senior year of high school, Lee applied to the Luna Composition Lab, a fellowship for female and nonbinary classical composers. At the end of the eight-month program, her group of six female and gender nonconforming composers had each composed a piece, all of which were then performed by the San Francisco-based Kronos quartet. “Being able to intimately connect with a group like that was really special,” Lee said.
Luna Composition Lab, founded by the composers Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid, is designed to help close the gender gap in classical composition. Only 7.5% of all pieces played by the world’s top orchestras are composed by women, and almost none — 0.1% — are written by nonbinary composers. The lab matches their fellows with mentors, workshops their original pieces throughout the year and hosts an annual festival to showcase their work. Since its founding in 2016, the lab has mentored 47 young composers, most of whom are now studying music or pursuing composition professionally.
“We only use the words ‘genius,’ ‘prodigy’ and ‘master’ to describe men,” Mazzoli said. “The idea of composing as a musical skill you’re born with means that young men are anointed as the next Mozart and get opportunities from a young age. I never see young women celebrated to the same extent.”
Challenging the gender imbalance in music composition
Despite renewed attention to gender discrimination and sexual harassment in classical music after the 2017 MeToo movement, progress has been slow, with recent dips in female composer representation.
In the 2023-2024 classical music season, men composed 92.5% of the works played by 111 orchestras across 30 countries. The top 10 composers, all deceased white European men, represented 31% of all pieces. The problem extends beyond classical music to other genres; of the top 200 highest-grossing movies of 2023, 90% were composed by men.
Mazzoli herself was the first female composer to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 2017. “Everything has changed in the last seven years,” she said. “A lot of organizations started scrambling to be more inclusive.”
That’s where Mazzoli and Reid stepped in to partner with classical music institutions across the country. When Mazzoli asked music conservatories and colleges why their classes lacked gender parity, they claimed that young female and nonbinary composers didn’t apply to their programs. “Something was happening during those adolescent years where young composers weren’t seeing any role models and therefore leaving,” she said.
Luna Composition Lab decided to focus on mentoring 13 to 18 year olds, because that’s where Mazzoli saw the most drop-off in the pipeline. “As teenagers, these composers are entering a male-dominated field that requires you to bear your soul,” she said. The lab offers mentorship with acclaimed composers, ensemble-taught masterclasses and opportunities for orchestra commissions so students can carve a direct path to pursuing composition professionally.
Ebun Oguntola, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University and Berklee College of Music, said there was no one she could look up to as a Black female violinist. She suffered microaggressions within her orchestra that discouraged her from performing. “It made me realize I wanted to shift gears to composition,” she said.
After joining the Luna Composition Lab, her mentor, another woman of color, encouraged her to stay true to her roots while embracing different genres of music. Oguntola found she enjoyed ignoring conventions and drawing inspiration from jazz. She said she’s thankful she found mentor support through the lab while entering the composing world. “Usually it’s the other way around, where you have to seek out safe spaces after experiencing discrimination,” she said.
Other fellows like Lili Masoudi, a 17-year-old sophomore studying composition at Bard College, didn’t realize how much diversity was lacking from other musical programs until they arrived at the fellowship. “Luna Lab was the first time where I didn’t feel invisible,” they said.
Lee Bynum, a diversity and inclusion expert in the performing arts, said that classical music has always reinforced the idea that a maestro or head musician in an orchestra will be male. “Even the term ‘classical music’ implies conserving a culture that never included women’s works in the canon,” they said.
Bynum, who has commissioned underrepresented composers at Lincoln Center in New York and the Minnesota Opera, emphasized that true equity means creating more compelling music at a time when the number of classical music listeners is lower than ever. They said it’s not enough to introduce the art form to minority composers. “We need to make professional organizations ready to welcome them, or there’s a very good chance classical music won’t survive,” they said.
Expanding possibilities for female and nonbinary composers
Angélica Negrón, a Luna Composition Lab mentor, said she openly shares her experiences of being ignored in classical music spaces with her mentees. “I used to keep these moments to myself because I wanted to be protective of my younger students,” she said. “But when you don’t share them out loud, you internalize them, and that’s when it gets dangerous.”
Negrón attended the Luna Lab Festival in San Francisco this June to support her mentee and was overcome with emotion at the celebration of all-female and nonbinary composers. “I was there as a mentor, but I didn’t realize how much I needed the festival myself,” she said.
In 2021, Luna Composition Lab expanded its programming to an eight-week course for beginner and intermediate teenage composers. Students study the work of female and nonbinary composers for eight weeks and then write their own original music to be performed by professional musicians. The hope is that they use those recordings to apply to the more advanced Luna Lab fellowship or other programs.
Past participants have gone on to imagine futures in music. Oguntola’s career dreams have evolved to include film composing. “Film scoring is the ultimate interdisciplinary form for me,” she said. “It’s so complex making music for visuals, cinematography and plot.”
Masoudi is writing a piece commissioned by the lab for a queer chamber ensemble in Brooklyn. They’re also working on an opera with Mazzoli about queer joy. “As a queer Iranian composer, I will always exist outside of the classical music tradition,” they said. “So I want to highlight perspectives that push back against that tradition.”
Lee, now a freshman at Princeton University and a member of a piano ensemble, brought her parents to this year’s Luna Lab Festival, where they attended the premiere of her piece, “dusting off.” She’s glad her music-loving father gets to witness her creative growth. “He said he was very impressed by my music,” said Lee. “Now he wants me to keep going and write something more accessible for him.”
