AFCM Pathways Emerging Composers Initiative
The Australian Festival of Chamber Music (AFCM) is proud to announce a significant expansion of its acclaimed AFCM Pathways Program, with $96,000 in new funding over two years awarded by Creative Australia through Music Australia to support the AFCM Pathways Emerging Composers Initiative.
This exciting new initiative will provide young Australian composers with immersive residencies in northern Queensland, mentorship by senior composers from the Festival program, and the opportunity to compose for and collaborate with the AFCM Fellowship Ensemble. Their works will be performed on the AFCM main stage and toured across regional Queensland, professionally recorded, and released digitally, offering a powerful platform for long-term artistic and career development.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body.
The 2025 and 2026 Emerging Composers are:
- Elizabeth Younan, a Juilliard doctoral candidate and GRAMMY-featured composer, recently awarded a prestigious John Monash Scholarship.
- Sam Wu, an internationally awarded composer whose collaborations span five continents and major orchestras including those in Philadelphia, Melbourne, and Shanghai.
Elizabeth Younan
Elizabeth Younan (b. 1994) is widely recognised as one of Australia’s finest young composers. Her violin solo, …your heart dreams of spring is featured on Jennifer Koh’s 2022 GRAMMY award-winning album, Alone Together. A composer for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s 50 Fanfares Project, Elizabeth has also written music for the acclaimed podcast Lost Women of Science, produced in partnership with PRX and Scientific American. Her work has been showcased by Musica Viva Australia during its 2018 and 2020 International Concert Seasons, and she has composed for principal players of the Philadelphia Orchestra as part of their Our City, Your Orchestra series.
Elizabeth has been privileged to collaborate with many eminent soloists and ensembles such as Joyce Yang, Anna da Silva Chen, Baron Fenwick, Arcadia Winds, Ensemble Offspring, The Merian Ensemble, Croissants & Whiskey, and the Goldner String Quartet, among others. Her accolades include a Daniel W. Dietrich II Young Alumni Fund Award from the Curtis Institute of Music, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Layton Emerging Composer Fellowship, the Watermark Composition Prize from the Kendall National Violin Competition, two Willgoss Prize Commissions (in association with USYD and UNSW), the Fine Music 102.5 / Willoughby Symphony Young Composer Award, and the Jean Bogan Youth Prize.
Sam Wu
Sam Wu's music "abounds in delicate colours, wisps of sound and sylvan textures" (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.
Selected for the American Composers Orchestra's EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and First Prize at the Washington International Competition, Sam Wu also received Harvard's Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard's Palmer Dixon Prize.
Sam’s collaborations span five continents, notably with the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Columbus, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, Cabrillo Festival, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, Romer, and icarus Quartets, conductors Osmo Vänskä, Marin Alsop, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dina Gilbert, and Benjamin Northey, violinist Johan Dalene, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei.
