We hope you had an exciting International Women’s Day! Celebrations and Observations for Women’s History Month continue!
On March 13, 2025 the members of the UN Symphony Orchestra will give their Global Women in Music concert at the NYU Skirball Performing Arts Center, conducted by Esperanza and Josefa de Velasco. The concert is an official UN event accompanying the UN Committee on the Status of Women (UNCSW 69), and will commemorate both the 30th Anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action, and the 400th Anniversary of the City of New York. The Global Women in Music Initiative features works by female composers form across the globe: Emilie Mayer‘s Ouverture “Faust,” Michiru Ōshima‘s Dual Rhapsodies, Audrey Morse‘s Reconciliation, Nazira Wali‘s Endless, Esperanza & Josefa de Velasco‘s Voladores, and Nkeiru Okoye‘s Voices Shouting Out. The program highlights the diversity of styles and ideas that women composers use (and have always used) when writing music for orchestra, as well as to promote gender equality.
Below is Nkeiru Okoye’s Voices Shouting Out, performed in 2020 by the Detroit Symphony and conducted by Thomas Wilkins.
Bette Eilers, trumpet
Photo Credit: IWBC
On March 7, the death of Bette Eilers was announced. Eilers was an important figure for women in orchestral music, but specifically for women in orchestral brass, as she built a career with the major classical music institutions in Chicago at a time when women who wanted careers in orchestral music had steep obstacles facing them on all sides. She auditioned and became principal trumpet of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago at seventeen, and began playing with the Chicago Symphony in 1954 when Fritz Reiner was its conductor. She continued throughout a who’s-who of conductors and famous premieres, including Khatchaturian’s Symphony No. 3 under the direction of Leopold Stokowski, and Stravinsky’s Firebird with Pierre Boulez—punishingly difficult and famous parts for exacting and demanding directors. In addition to the Civic and Symphony Orchestras, she also played with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In June of 2006, the International Women’s Brass Conference awarded her its Pioneer Award, in recognition of her groundbreaking career. Her full interview following the award can be read here, scanned from its original in IWBC’s NoteWorthy in 2007.
On April 5, 2025 the National Philharmonic will present pieces by Ethel Smyth and Margaret Bonds, conducted by Naima Burrs. (The program also includes Shostakovich.) Smyth’s overture to her opera The Boatswain’s Mate (1913/14) has recently become a favorite in the orchestral repertoire of British music, and offers a bright and whimsical contrast to her previous opera The Wreckers. The piece is understandably regarded as a feminist opera—in addition to a plot where a strong heroic resists the advances of the boatswain of the piece’s title by pretending to shoot his collaborator (in true comic opera fashion), Smyth also quotes her famous tune “March of the Women,” the lyrics of which are a call to suffrage action for women. The tune features in the overture as well. Margaret Bonds‘s Montgomery Variations was first recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra in 2021. Its seven movements—Decision, Prayer Meeting, March, Dawn in Dixie, One Sunday in the South, Lament, and Benediction—are all evocative of different moments during the first decade of the Civil Rights Movement, beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Bonds wrote the Variations before the plans for the third Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, following two musical tours of the South with baritone Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires. The piece is a group of freestyle variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” (Bonds’s own program note and also here where those notes are quoted in a longer program note.)
Below you can listen to the overture to The Boatswain’s Mate performed by the BBC National orchestra of Wales in 2020 conducted by Rumon Gamba and Montgomery Variations performed by the Minnesota Orchestra and conducted by Scott Yoo.
Smyth, Overture to The Boatswain’s Mate (1913/14):
Bonds, Montgomery Variations (1964):
In honor of International Women’s Day 2025, pianist Alexandra Dariescu will perform the music of Clara Schumann, Nadia Boulanger, and Doreen Carwithen. She will perform Schumann and Boulanger with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on March 21, and the Doreen Carwithen Piano Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Center on April 11. Her interview with Juliette Barber of International Arts Manager gave her a chance to speak at length about her mission to bring more women composers into the classical music canon.
Below is a recording of the Carwithen Concerto for Piano and Strings that Dariescu will play on the 11th, performed by Alison Freeman (piano) with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dean Whiteside. The video was made possible by the William Alwyn Foundation (executor of the Carwithen estate) and the Michigan Recording Project.
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