Here’s an idea I like a lot. Violinist Hilary Hahn, who comes to Fort Lauderdale next week as part of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts’ classical music series, is throwing a contest. She’s looking for a composer to write a new violin encore for her to play at one of her concerts, as part of a bid to expand the encore repertoire beyond the “Liebesfreud” and”Zigeunerweisen” options that make up a lot of the traveling violinist’s showpiece repertoire.

The composer chosen through the online contest will be the 27th and final supplier of new Hahn encores. She’s already commissioned 26 others from composers around the globe, ranging from the young Nico Muhly to no less than Poland’s Krzysztof Penderecki and Finland’s Einojuhani Rautavaara. Other names on her list are no less eminent: David Del Tredici, Paul Moravec, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Jennifer Higdon; James Newton Howard, Mason Bates, Elliott Sharp, David Lang and Lera Auerbach.

It’s a remarkable gathering of compositional talents, and it came out of a process that began about 10 years ago when Hahn said she was examining collections of violin encores — “golden oldies, which are great,” she says — and something occurred to her. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I wonder where the new ones are?’”

Then began a process of reaching out to composers around the world to see whether they’d be interested in writing for her, and when she finally looked up from gathering them, she had 26 pieces. “I got carried away and I had to stop somewhere,” she told me last week in an interview from the road.

And so for the 27th piece, she has reached out to every composer who feels like setting something down. I imagine she’s going to be swamped, and small wonder.

The rules for the contest, which begins Nov. 15 and lasts through March 15 of next year, are clear. Anyone, anywhere can write a piece, it has to be no more than 5 minutes long, only be for violin and piano (no electronics, tape, etc.) and must be complete as is. The pieces have to be written for the project — which is called “In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores” — and can’t have been submitted for any other contest.

If you win, here’s what you get: Hahn plays the piece on her 2012-13 concert programs and records it for release in the 2013-14 season. You can’t beat that for exposure. I remember interviewing Hahn 15 years ago when she was just 17 and had just begun work on her first recording, an all-solo disc of music by J.S. Bach.

That, it seemed to me, spoke volumes about the serious mind this musician had; if ever there was a time to crank out the Massenet Meditation from Thais, it’d be on your first album as a soloist. But she went right to the heart of some of the most absorbing, challenging repertoire there is. And she’s followed that up with a stellar career, commissioning new pieces from Edgar Meyer and Higdon, making a strong case for the Schoenberg Violin Concerto and the Bernstein “Serenade,” and making sure at the same time to pursue some crossover (with folkie Josh Ritter) and do her appearances at unconventional venues, such as Joe’s Pub.

Make no mistake: This is a young musician with serious clout, whose formidable intelligence (read her online journals, or see her handling TV interviews in French and German on YouTube) and astonishing work ethic have led her to make no missteps in an industry full of pitfalls and very little mercy. And she’s really done this by herself; it’s a homemade career, and a brilliant one, and her blessing on new work goes a long way.

We’ll be able to hear some of those encores Nov. 6 in Fort Lauderdale; she appears with the Ukrainian-born pianist and longtime Miami resident Valentina Lisitsa, with whom she’s just released a disc of all four sonatas by Charles Ives — another nervy, brainy, serious choice. Before the encores, she’ll play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 2 (in A, Op. 12, No. 2), the Bach Sonata in G minor (BWV 1001) and the sonata movement Johannes Brahms wrote in 1853 as a collaboration with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich, who worked most of his life as a kapellmeister rather than a composer.

If you’ve got a hankering to write some music for the violin, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better person to write it for. The website is www.hilaryhahncontest.com, and it will be fascinating to see what comes out of this competition. I’m sure it will be a tremendous amount of music, and she will find it difficult to choose just which one to single out.

But if anyone’s up to a challenge, it’s Hahn.