One of our most fascinating projects to date, 'Forgotten Voices' is an ongoing research and performance project with the goal of rediscovering and celebrating women composers of the past to ensure they have much more of a 'voice' than they have had compared to their male counterparts in modern programming.  The original festival has led to an ongoing collaboration with Oxford Lieder.

We celebrated International Women’s Day 2021 with an online festival showcasing some of the extraordinary music composed by women over the last 180 years. Working in association with HERA, we put together a programme of over eighty songs and arias which will be recorded by 50 students from the UK’s conservatoires and young artist programmes.

The festival launched at 4pm on 6 March with a live-streamed, hour-long concert from Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama celebrating Welsh composers past and present. Over the course of the following week we released more videos – recorded in lockdown – every day, with the intention of flooding social media with the wealth of talent from female composers. 

The festival featured music by composers including Maud Cuney-Hare, Elaine Hughes-Jones, and Laura Netzel along with some unpublished songs by Margaret Bonds, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, and Rebecca Clarke. This was the first chapter in an ambitious new project to build a comprehensive database to facilitate and encourage more programming – and awareness - of works by female composers. 

Our co-founder Kitty says, ‘Although there are many websites which catalogue the names and dates of female composers, they all lack recordings. Artists looking to expand their repertoire of women’s music need to hear a snapshot of a composer’s music to get a flavour of her sound-world in order to decide if they are attracted to her style and interested in exploring more. If recordings of a composer’s music were free and easily accessible, I know I personally would be far more likely to be more adventurous in my programming.’

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We’re delighted to be working with Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Royal Northern College of Music, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and Trinity Laban as well as singers from the National Opera Studio.

A full list of featured composers:

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