Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin to Foreground Women Composers in 2023/24 Season

"There shall be no symphony concert without one piece by a female composer" is the DSO's new motto for the forthcoming season

The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO) has implemented a new measure that aims to improve gender parity in programming. The orchestra has decided that in the 2023/24 season, every single concert must feature at least one work by a woman composer, and has publicly announced the measure for accountability.

The orchestra notes that at present, music written by female composers accounts for only 2% of the works performed by professional orchestras in Germany. That figure is even lower than the global standard: for instance, a report by the organization Donne: Women in Music found that 7.7% of orchestral programming worldwide in the 2021/22 season consisted of works by women (the survey covered 31 different countries).

The DSO's 2023/24 season will feature works by women from the twelfth century through to today — including Unsuk Chin, Jessie Montgomery, Camille Pépin, Helen Grime, Fanny Hensel, Elizabeth Ogonek, Anna Clyne, Olga Neuwirth, Thea Musgrave, Hildegard von Bingen, Ethel Smyth, Lili Boulanger, and more.

"There shall be no symphony concert without one piece by a female composer. That is our motto for the 2023/2024 season," wrote Music Director Robin Ticciati and Managing Director Thomas Schmidt-Orr. "And who knows — this could become the formula for concert performances on an international level."

"It might sound ambitious, but we’d like to call it 'Feminist Music Policy' — in reference to the still-young 'Feminist Foreign Policy' of Canada, France, Luxembourg, Spain, and most recently also Germany. The way the DSO understands it, feminism in the orchestral world challenges patriarchal systems that pervade power structures, personnel composition, and repertoire selection."

"It addresses gender inequality in our daily operations and, at the same time, other forms of oppression, based for example on race, class, or sexual orientation," they continued."With its No programme without a female composer claim, the DSO supports a feminist vision of classical music that is based on equality and justice."