Women at Top in Music : Premiere: Long Beach Symphony music director JoAnn Falletta will conduct composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s new work tonight.

Women working with women may be common in many fields, but it’s still pretty rare in the world of music, at least at the top. But, slowly, even that is changing.

Long Beach Symphony music director JoAnn Falletta, 39, who became the first American-born woman ever appointed to lead a regional orchestra when she was appointed director in 1989, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich will be together tonight at the Terrace Theater when Falletta conducts the Long Beach Symphony in the premiere performance of Zwilich’s newest work, “Fantasy for Orchestra,” which Falletta also commissioned.

In a telephone interview earlier this week, Falletta said she would like this to be a non-issue but acknowledges that it still is. She maintains a tradition of fostering women composers, but she wanted to work with Zwilich for her talent, not just because of gender issues.

“Ellen, for us is a tremendous coup; she has been commissioned by all the major symphonies,” Falletta said. “When I asked her a couple of years ago (to compose a work for Long Beach) and she said yes, I was just thrilled, because I know this piece will go on from Long Beach to be played all over the world.” Certainly Zwilich has a track record for such accomplishment: Her work has been performed by major orchestras worldwide.

Falletta, who recently signed a three-year contract to continue as the Long Beach Symphony director (she divides her time between three orchestras: Long Beach, the Virginia Symphony and San Francisco’s Women’s Philharmonic), said she often directs the Women’s Philharmonic in works by contemporary women, including Zwilich, as well as women composers of the past whose works are rarely heard, including Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Alma Mahler. On Jan. 29, the Women’s Philharmonic will feature North American composers in a “salute to uncommon women.”

Yet, while both women feel the need to nurture women in composing and conducting, both insist that there is no such thing as “women’s” music.

“Really, having looked at hundreds and hundreds of scores, I can’t discern any difference,” Falletta said. “There is nothing that is gender based. . . . I know there are people who sit out there and think that if it’s a woman composer, it will be very gentle and full of harp credenzas, but (Zwilich’s music) is very strong and very powerful. All of a sudden their preconceptions of what women do are changed.”

Zwilich said she believes that it is more difficult for women to break into conducting than composing or performing orchestra music. “The behind-the-screen audition process has been very beneficial for women who play orchestral instruments, and with a piece of music, the musician has little relation with the composer,” she said. “But the podium issue directly raises the issue of power and is the last frontier, I think, of music.

“With the extraordinary range of what’s going on in contemporary music, each composer is quite individual,” Zwilich continued. “I suppose it would be possible, in time, to go back and assess it, but I think people write the music that is in their minds and in their hearts.

“I also remember a time when people actually talked about whether Mozart’s music was ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’ It seemed kind of silly, to invent a category and find things that fit.”

Both women believe that there are as many preconceptions about orchestral music as a whole as there are about women in that arena. “Someone once asked me if I was a living composer,” Zwilich said in a recent telephone conversation from her Florida home. “I said yes--after I stopped laughing.”

Zwilich, who based her four-part composition on her experiences during a visit to Italy last summer (“It began with a kind of free collaboration on church bells I was hearing”), said she hopes the audience will be energized, rather than turned off, by being the first to hear a piece by a “living composer.”

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“It’s very unsettling for some audiences not to know what they are getting into, but, when you think about it, it’s an extraordinarily exciting moment,” she said. “My experience has been that audiences are really digging in and feeling something special the moment something comes alive, particularly something by someone whose life experience is at least contemporaneous with theirs.”

Falletta said the symphony commissions new works to help change the perception that orchestral music is the province of dead European males. “I really feel very strongly that an orchestra is not a museum,” said Falletta. “We do one or two (new) works a year by young American composers; that has become part of our identity.” This year’s commissions are Zwilich’s “Fantasy” and the “Fractal Bow” by California composer Martin Herman, to be presented April 23.

“And, while some people are saying they’d just as soon hear Beethoven all the time, others say the new works show that we have a vision, and a mission, and are making a difference in the orchestral life of this country,” Falletta continued. “(The audience) may be complaining about a new piece, but they are talking about it, and writing letters to us about it. We have become a model for other orchestras in the country because we have taken risks.”