Seattle’s Unbound Symphony debut at Folio: Seattle Athenaeum to a small crowd of 40 Monday evening. The show included two pieces and one demonstration of the double bass by one of the Symphony members.
Unbound Symphony officially launched on March 8, 2026 on International Women’s Day as a new professional orchestra of women performing music written by women.
Dr. Sarah Bassingthwaighte, who is one of the Symphony’s resident composers, said the Symphony is an ensemble of 58 women and nonconforming gender musicians who are dedicated to “amplify and center women as both composers and performers.” She framed the group’s mission as a response to entrenched gender disparities in classical music, noting that studies of major orchestras show that “Mozart alone is programmed more often than all women composers combined.”
Bassingthwaighte said that during the music studies in universities and conservatories, there was almost no mention of women composers.
“Since there was almost no mention of any other women, I assumed there weren’t any,” she said. “In researching pieces for Unbound Symphony, I found hundreds and then thousands of pieces by women, stretching back centuries and representing all periods of music. Some of them were famous in their time, like Nannerl Mozart. That’s Wolfgang’s [Amadeus] sister, who was brilliant, but their names have often been forgotten.”
Bassingthwaighte said that she had first heard of composers Lily Boulogne and Julia Perry in the last decade. “I realized that we’ve been deprived of various music through all the years that I’ve been a composer,” she said.
Citing data from the top 20 U.S. orchestras’ 2026-27 seasons, Bassingthwaighte said women make up 21% of programmed composers but account for only 11% of performed pieces and an even smaller share of total minutes of music.
“There are 21 total hours of music by women. By comparison, there are 54 hours of music by Beethoven,” she said. “In minutes, 8% were works by women.”
Bassingthwaighte added that studies among the top 20 orchestras in the U.S., “93% of programmed orchestral music is by men, 89% is by white men, and 78% is by dead white men.”
According to the 2023-24 Equality Diversity Global Repertoire Donne Report, women composed just 7.5% of scheduled works, a slight decline from 7.7% in 2022-23. Of works by women, 5.8% were composed by white women, while women from the global majority accounted for 1.6%:
- Black women: 0.59%
- Asian women: 0.50%
- Mixed-heritage women: 0.40%
- Indigenous women: 0.07%
- Middle Eastern women: 0.02%
Men composed 92.5% of scheduled works with white men accounting for 89.3%. Global majority men contributed 3.2%:
- Black men: 1.76%
- Asian men: 0.76%
- Mixed-heritage men: 0.20%
- Middle Eastern men: 0.19%
- Indigenous men: 0.06%
Non-binary composers represented less than 0.1% of total scheduled works.
“Women have been historically underrepresented in classical music,” she said, pointing to pay gaps, exclusion from leadership roles and ongoing concerns about safety and belonging.
“Mozart alone is programmed more often than all women composers combined, so there’s a long history behind the dominance of music by male composers,” Bassingthwaighte said. “Unbound Symphony is dedicated to making music by women composers more available, accessible, and familiar to audiences.”
Bassingthwaighte then turned to the double bass concerto with bassist Esther Kwon. She said the double bass is underrepresented in three ways:
- The field of double bass players is heavily male-dominated.
- The double bass instrument is rarely featured as a solo instrument compared with other strings.
- The music is often not composed by a woman.
Bassingthwaighte said the piece was written for double bassist Steve Schermer and was commissioned by the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra, later recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The first movement, “Lacrimae,” reflects shared bereavement of losing a family member between Bassingthwaighte and Shermer. The piece aims to capture “both the beauty of those relationships and the deep sadness of the loss,” she said.
Addressing the challenges of writing for a relatively quiet instrument, Bassingthwaighte had five strategies to compose for a double bass:
- Keep the orchestration “light”
- Write on the higher notes of the bass (which Shermer had told her, “Please don’t do that.”)
- Contrast it with instruments of different tone color
- Keep the instruments in a different register from the bass
- Alternate bass solos with “full orchestral passages”
Instead, she outlined strategies such as contrasting the bass with instruments of very different tone colors, keeping other instruments in different registers and alternating bass solos with “explosive outbursts” from the orchestra so the solo line can still speak clearly.
“I wanted to bring out the instrument’s lyrical beauty,” she said, while also showcasing pizzicato, slides, jazz inflections and harmonics.
Bassingthwaighte said composers have historically shied away from long melodies and virtuosic passages. “So I wanted to bring out the instrument’s lyrical beauty, while also showing the wide range of colors and styles that are so compelling on the bass.”
Unbound Symphony members also performed two additional scores, including Rebecca Clarke’s Lullaby (1916) and Althea Talbot-Howard’s Seville Cathedral, a Study in Memory – in Arch Form (2022).
Unbound Symphony Founder and President Bhavani Kotha said she met Bassingthwaighte when she was about 11 or 12 years old in a woodwind quintet. She said she was inspired by one of her flute students, which pushed her to improve on the oboe skills. She later met Bassingthwaighte as a composer in 2012 when Bassingthwaighte’s work “A Mountain Symphony” was performed with the Seattle Collaborative Orchestra under conductor Anna Edwards.
“When I was just starting out, embarking on a career…I didn’t realize how rare it was to witness a whole symphony by a woman—and also a woman conductor,” Kotha said. “To be a part of that was really life changing.”
Kotha said that in most orchestras, men still dominate the roles of conductor, composer and CEO, even as more women have joined the ranks of performers.
“Anytime there’s a lot of men, or they’re in dominant position, there’s always a threat of violence,” she said. “You can never feel completely 100% safe with your guard down.”
Kotha added that freelance musicians who are not tenured have fewer protections if they speak up. In contrast, she said, being in a women-centered, supportive ensemble creates a sense of safety and freedom that allows for more vulnerable artistic expression and the discovery of underperformed works and “untold stories.”
Kotha said Unbound Symphony is partnering with the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center to create a survey to document musicians’ experiences, gather data on harassment and safety and help make symphony orchestras’ procedures more “friendly and safer for everyone.”
She said she worries about her younger students entering the profession and wants future generations of women in music to be better protected.
“I think we do need our own pocket,” she said. “I think it could become like a normal thing…like, every city just has [its] own women’s orchestra. That would be really cool.”
Bassingthwaighte said the Unbound Symphony’s goal is to make music more available, accessible and familiar to women. “We truly believe that once people are introduced to this music, they will love it,” she said.
Unbound Symphony will have its inaugural performance July 10 at the Highland Performing Arts Center in Burien. Tickets can be purchased at Ticket Tailor.
