We hope you are having a beautiful summer! Here’s some news to start your week!
On Sunday July 20th at 7PM, BBC Radio Scotland will present an all-women composers program of classical music. The program will be available for streaming shortly after the live broadcast. It will feature music by a few classic 19th century European women (Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn) as well as some medieval women (Kassia, Hildegard of Bingen), but the lion’s share of the program will be given to music by women composers in British music. Works by Imogen Holst, Judith Weir, and Ethel Smyth—all recognized as titans in the lineage of women composers in Britain—will all make an appearance, as will pieces by Anna Meredith, Anoushka Shankar, Evelyn Glennie, Phamie Gow, Sally Beamish, Catriona McKay, and Errolyn Wallen (CBE, Master of the King’s Music). These works will span all ensemble sizes from small chamber groups to full orchestra.
Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)—the award-winning contemporary chamber ensemble from San Francisco—has announced the winners of its 2025 Call for Scores, its second Call for Scores collaboration with Luna Composition Labs. This two-year collaboration is part of Luna Lab‘s 10th Anniversary celebration. E4TT will perform competition winner Elisa Kain Johnson’s Divide and Concur for piano trio in January 2026 at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland. The piece will be the newest item on the group’s annual program of music by women and non-binary composers. The following year (January 2027), the ensemble will play the premieres of three new works commissioned by the program by composers Peyton Nelesen, Ilaria Hawley, Èbùn Ogutola. As a part of their selection, the composers will be mentored by three women composers: Vivian Fung, Carla Lucero, and Kay Rhie.
“The Expansive Canvas Creative Palette Project,” curated by conductor Sinéad Hayes, has announced that its international conference on 19th-century women composers will take place in Dublin August 26–28, 2025. The conference will be hosted jointly by the Department Music at Trinity College Dublin & the Royal Irish Academy of Music. They are seeking creative responses for this conference. The conference will have scholarly papers, performances, presentations by music industry professionals, and a curated digital exhibition of project submissions to Creative Palette available. According to their website, audio submissions will contribute to an audio tour around Trinity College during the conference. The conference invites members of the public to respond to the work of women composers as freely as they wish: a piece of writing; a drawing, painting, or collage; a new piece of music or sound art; a short radio play or audio drama; a storyboard for a film, or a photo essay; or a curated playlist that journeys through the world of a composer. A creative palette document is available to download as a springboard for ideas. The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2025.
On Monday July 14th, the London Symphony Orchestra will present a performance of the winning pieces of the Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme Workshops in the Great Hall of Blackheath Halls, London. The scheme aims to offer composers a chance to write for a full symphony orchestra who have not yet had an opportunity to do so, and welcomes composers who bring diverse backgrounds or approaches to writing for orchestra to the table. Women composers featured on the July 14th concert include: Laila Arafah, Monika Dalach Sayers, Margarida Gonçalves, Emily Hazrati, and Sasha Scott—alumni from the 2023/24 and 2024/25 workshops.
The Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin is offering a “concerts with women composers” tickets package for the 2025/26 season. Each concert in the series includes a work by a woman composer alongside other fan favorites. The works include: Britta Byström’s täckminnen (Screen memories) – Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra No. 2; Anna Korsun’s Terricone for symphony orchestra; Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour; Kaija Saariaho’s “Notes on Light” – Concerto for violoncello and orchestra; Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn’s Overture in C Major for Orchestra; and Augusta Read Thomas’s Plea for Peace for chamber orchestra.
On July 11th Peter Jacobs (pianist) released a new album on Heritage Records: The Silent Pool: British Piano Music by Women Composers. The album includes pieces by some composers well known to readers of WPA: Ethel Smyth (Piano Sonata No. 3), Elizabeth Maconchy (A Country Town), Grace Williams (The Silent Pool), Helen Grime (The Silver Moon), Madeleine Dring (The Colour Suite), Judith Bingham (The Moon Over Westminster Cathedral and Christmas Past, Christmas Present), Amy Woodforde-Finden (Indian Love Lyrics), Cecilia MacDowell (Vespers in Venice), Betty Roe (A Mystery of Cats), Sally Beamish (A Lullaby of Owain), Raie De Costa (Gigue and Moods), and Liza Lehmann (Cobweb Castle). The album is available to stream via Spotify, and to purchase from Heritage Records. Between this album and the BBC Radio Scotland broadcast, it’s a great time to get excited about women in British music!
Finally, on July 23, if you are in the Boston area, you can hear the wonderful Boston Landmarks Orchestra perform a fantastic concert featuring composers with ties to Boston. These include Amy Beach’s monumental and moving Piano Concerto, in c minor, op. 54, which the composer premiered herself in 1900; the brilliant Asiya Korepanova will be the soloist in this performance. The program also includes Florence Price’s “Juba” from her Symphony n. 1. While Beach is known as a famed historic Boston resident (having lived only a few blocks from where the Hatch Shell was later built) Florence Price is less often associated with Boston. Yet she attended the New England Conservatory from 1902 to 1906, receiving degrees in organ performance and piano pedagogy; she also studied composition at NEC. AND — we have a theory that Price surely would have known about Beach; George Chadwick was Price’s composition teacher at Chadwick NEC, as he was an admirer of Beach’s music he would have mentioned Beach to Price. And it is even possible that Price and Beach met ….. because, the first American woman to write a Symphony, and the second American woman who would write a Symphony — they were both there in Boston in those years — they could have met at Boston’s Symphony Hall! OK, just a theory, but you heard it here first!
Amy Beach and Asiya Korepanova
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org