This week four of our five stories feature women of African descent!
The first performance of the African Women’s Orchestra will take place during the Rewind, Remix, Reclaim Festival at the Goethe Institute, in Nairobi. The festival runs from 15–25 July 2025, commemorating the original 1985 Festival on the same dates. It will explore the legacy of the original festival through feminist video & film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, art installations, concerts, and performances.
Errollyn Wallen, CBE, composer
On July 18th, Errollyn Wallen, CBE had the world premiere of her new piece The Elements on the first night of BBC Proms 2025. The piece is a BBC commission, and in-depth coverage of the premiere from WPA is forthcoming. The concert broadcast is available via video or audio, and streamable via BBC 3 & iPlayer. We will be writing in more detail about this concert shortly!
On July 19th Maria Thompson Corley (piano) and Nadine Benjamin (soprano) presented a program of music by women composers of African descent at Wigmore Hall, London as part of its African Concert series. Corley is a composer, writer, and poet in addition to being a pianist, and had devoted her career to playing, recording, and promoting the work of Black women composers the world over. The concert included: L. Viola Kinney’s Mother’s Sacrifice, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryan Guèbrou’s Mother’s Love, Shirley Thompson’s Psalm to Windrush: for the Brave and Indigenous, Errolyn Wallen’s I wouldn’t normally say, Nkeiru Okoye’s African Sketches and Dusk, Eleanor Alberga’s Jamaican Medley, and Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1 in E minor. It also included three original pieces by the composer—”My Heart is Awake” and “Violin” from Grasping Water, and Piano Man—and her own arrangements of the spirituals “Sanctuary” and “Hold On.”
Below is Corley’s 2021 album, Soulscapes 2, which maintains the spirit and variety of the recent recital.
Nathalie Joachim, composer & performer
Composer & Performer Nathalie Joachim has been named Composer-in-Residence for the 2025/26 season of Opera Philadelphia. She will curate two concerts—one of her own works, and one of her artistic inspirations and influences—and contribute to the opera Complications of Sue produced by the organization. The opera is a compilation of ten vignettes, each with a different composer.
Joachim is a graduate of Julliard and of the New School, and is a United States Artist Fellow, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, a co-founder of the duo Flutronix, and currently Assistant Professor of Composition at Princeton University. She is regularly commissioned to write for ensembles of all sizes, including orchestras. Recent commissions and work have included pieces for Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Spoleto Festival USA. Her first album, “Fanm d’Ayiti” (Women of Haiti) was nominated for a Grammy.
The BBC is offering some coverage of overlooked wives of classical composers in its Classical arena, entitled “Brilliant, burdened, overlooked: the women who made classical music happen.” They have included Constanze Mozart, Pauline Strauss, Alma Mahler, Clara Schumann, (Lady) Alice Elgar, Aino Sibelius, (Lady) Susana Walton, and Anne Marie Nielsen. Some (Constanze and Alma) are often treated as notorious in the lore of classical music, while others like Clara Schumann and Alice Elgar are better known for laboring as champions of their husbands’ music. A broader acknowledgement that this and other coverage of composers’ wives makes is that these women were not simply the wives of “great” men, but often responsible for much of their success. Their labor is some of the easiest to render invisible in accounts and understanding of music, especially in large-scale orchestral works.
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