Skipton Music 75th Anniversary Season: ‘Hidden Treasures’: Celebrating Women Composers Across The Ages

Run by a team of local volunteers, Skipton Music has been bringing world-class music to the Yorkshire Dales since 1947. This year, the group celebrate their 75th anniversary with a groundbreaking series of concerts featuring more than 30 female composers.

Entitled ‘Hidden Treasures: Celebrating Women Composers across the Ages’ , they hope to bring a range of beautiful but much-neglected music by women composers to the ears of their audience.

The inspiration and driving force behind this anniversary season is Skipton Music’s Concerts Secretary, Sally Johnson, a former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leeds and a keen amateur flautist.



Sadly, a trawl through Skipton Music’s own back catalogue merely confirmed this sorry state of affairs: of some 2000 works performed since 1947, Sally could find no more than 20 that were written by women.

Of course, Skipton Music is not unusual in this regard. Writing in 2018, Eleanor Ward, the executive director of Non Classical, a contemporary classical organisation based in London noted how: “Classical music is still pale, male and stale – even though there are amazing female performers, composers, conductors and artists out there.” And in 2020, research commissioned by the charity Donne: Women in Music found that only 5% of all the classical music performed around the world was composed by women - a shocking statistic in the 21st century.

This year’s BBC Proms shows that there is still a long way to go to redress the balance. The 8-week celebration of 84 concerts featured over 200 works by male composers compared to just over 30 by female composers, with only one prom - Ethel Smyth’s ‘The Wreckers’ - dedicated solely to music written by a woman.

Progress has been made in one area: this year the BBC made good on its 2018 pledge to achieve a 50/50 gender balance in commissions of contemporary composers by 2022 - out of 17 new Proms commissions, 10 are by women.

Female composers are also underrepresented on mainstream classical music radio. Although BBC Radio 3 and Scala Radio now dedicate an entire 24 hours of their schedule to female composers on International Women’s Day each year, on a day-to-day basis, there’s still nowhere near enough music by women composers being played. To give some idea of the disparity: out of 27 works recently featured on a daily three-hour show, only three were by women. Looking back at the show notes for the previous seven days, I found this to be a typical male-to-female ratio.

All of which highlights the scale and ambition of Skipton Music’s 75th anniversary season. That this concert series is being hosted by a not-for-profit charity run by volunteers is nothing short of remarkable and the whole season should be the envy of many national music organisations.



She pointed out that, whilst some of the programmes consist solely of works by female composers, many of this year’s artists chose to showcase the work of female composers alongside their male contemporaries.

The season opens on Tuesday 4 October 2022 at Skipton Town Hall with ‘I, Clara - Clara Schumann: A Life in Music’. It is the sixth ‘Composer Portrait’ created by Lucy Parham and received its London premiere in October 2019 to mark the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth.

Described as ‘One of the must-see events of the musical calendar’ by BBC Music Magazine, this special show features the creator of ‘I, Clara’, renowned pianist and broadcaster Lucy Parham, and acclaimed actor Joanna David (Downton Abbey, Inspector Morse) as the narrator. Together in ‘words and music’ they tell the extraordinary life story of Clara Schumann - child prodigy, celebrated composer and one of the most influential concert pianists of the 19th century.

The narrative of ‘I, Clara’, drawn from letters and diaries, is interspersed with live performances of her works, and of music by Robert Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Chopin.



To find out more about Skipton Music’s 75th anniversary season see www.skiptonmusic.org.uk