The New York Philharmonic is essentially taking a pass on the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. Instead, the orchestra is celebrating another, more relevant anniversary in 2020: the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote. What better way to do so than to celebrate women composers?

Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission new pieces from 19 women, was inaugurated on Wednesday when Jaap van Zweden led the premiere of the Nina C. Young’s “Tread softly.”

Ms. Young, 35, describes herself as a composer and sound artist. She began her life in music as a violinist, but then became an engineer before taking up composition. She reconciled the two by becoming an “engineer of sound,” as she put it from the stage before the performance. “Problem solved.”

Her 14-minute piece takes its title from a line of Yeats: “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” This thought seemed appropriate to Project 19, she said in her remarks, since women often have dreams that come true only to be smothered. In “Tread softly,” she added, sounds emerge from the ether only to get “shut down.”