A composer is anyone who creates music.
Our Mission
Wildflower Composers amplifies the voices of female, transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer composers by providing accessible and high-quality programming, resources, and mentorship to a global community of early-career composers.
Our Vision
We envision a truly equitable and diverse field of contemporary music, where composers of all identities have the opportunities and resources they need to succeed.
Our Name
Wildflowers are not constrained by specifics. They are a mix of colors, of sizes, of scents. They can (and do) grow anywhere, without restraint.
We decided to change our name from Young Women Composers to Wildflower Composers to better represent the young composers we have promised to support, all of whom bring with them different experiences, backgrounds, and identities.
Learn more about this process and the history of our organization by visiting the About Us page.
Our Origin
In the hopes of addressing the gender disparity in contemporary classical music, we began bringing together young, gender-marginalized composers for composition mentorship, coursework, and community-building.
Our founder, Erin Busch, formed Wildflower Composers in 2018 under the name Young Women Composers Camp (YWCC). With the help of many staff and faculty members at the Boyer College of Music at Temple University (as well as a start-up grant, awarded to Dr. Cynthia Folio on our behalf), we ran our first season in 2018 with 18 high school students from across the country. Since then, we have run a summer festival each July – either at Temple University, or online –and have facilitated more than 150 world premieres.
Visit the About Us page to learn more about our founding and previous seasons.
Our Composers
We serve cis-women, trans-women, trans-men, and those who are nonbinary or genderqueer.
We recognize that the label of “composer” can be affirming or alienating depending on personal experiences, and can imply that one must have some level of experience or must write in a certain style. We reject this narrow-minded interpretation, and define a composer as anyone who creates music, regardless of their age, experience, training, or musical aesthetic.
If you have questions about a particular program or eligibility, please get in touch using our Contact page.
“I'm certain now that I want to major in music and make composing my career. [Wildflower] seriously helped me in every way to find my passion and follow it, and I can't thank you enough.”
– Lux Ezra Onigman, Wildflower ‘20
By the Numbers
By providing accessible, high-quality education, resources, and mentorship to young, gender-marginalized composers, Wildflower Composers is working towards narrowing the gender gap and increasing the representation of gender-diverse composers across all genres.
Female and genderqueer composers remain incredibly under-represented in classical music. Recent studies by Donne, Women in Music show how dismal these numbers truly are. Their most recent study analyzed the repertoire of 15 major orchestras worldwide during their 2019–2020 concert season, and found that out of nearly 4,000 works, only 142 were composed by women, and only 8.2% of all concerts included a single piece by a non-male composer.
