Sydney-based composer Ian Whitney has been crunching the numbers for 2017 flagship seasons on his blog.

Sydney-based composer Ian Whitney has published an analysis of the Australian content in the flagship seasons of Australia’s major music organisations on his blog and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra is the big winner in the orchestral section with 12% of the works listed for performance being by Australian composers.

Dividing the organisations into three categories (Orchestras, Opera and Chamber), Whitney has ranked the organisations based on the percentage of Australian works on their programmes and included data on how many of the Australian composers are women. Whitney makes it clear on his blog that the numbers come from the season brochures of each organisation and don’t include data from education and outreach programmes or programmes where the repertoire is announced closer to the time – such as mini-festivals and special presentations.

^{Elena Kats-Chernin is the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence in 2017}

The TSO’s percentage of Australian works is up from 2016, where Whitney clocked them at 5%. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra came in second (on par with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) this year,...