Blog | Cambridge | Minerva Festival

The blog is open for submissions throughout the year, please get in touch via email (theminervafestival@gmail.com) if you have an idea for a piece, we would love to hear from you!

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Silent in the Churches

An illustrated lecture by Sarah MacDonald with the Selwyn Consort (members of the Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge) Minerva Festival | Great St Mary’s Chur...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Music museums kept only for men?

Museums and exhibitions seem to be thriving in most places across Europe at the moment, with virtually every reasonable sized town and city having at least ...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Britten Sinfonia on Freya Waley-Cohen

Described as ‘at once intimate and visionary’ by BBC Music Magazine, Freya Waley-Cohen’s music has been performed all over the country in a plethora of prest...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Introducing Minerva 2020

HELLO! The Minerva Festival turns two this year! Inaugurated in 2018, the festival aimed to elevate the voices of female composers who had been overlooked by...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Katharine Parton on music and motherhood

Historically, when women have had a career in music they leave the professional sphere when they marry and then fade further into the background when they be...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Women, liturgy and music

Redressing the imbalance of women in music means creating spaces for them to be properly, seriously valued – a space which has historically been denied. Many...

cambridgefemalecomposers

'Compose yourself': The female composer in musical theatre

As James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome once wrote, this is a man’s world. Forms of expression, narrative and even language have arguably been dictated and dom...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Rebecca Clarke: impostor syndrome and potential power

I first came across the music of Rebecca Clarke when I learnt her piece ‘Morpheus’ for viola and piano. It is a beautiful folky, impressionistic piece evokin...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Sophie Westbrooke on Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) was a French harpsichordist, organist and composer known in the court of Louis XIV. She was born into a family of ...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Time to Take Notice: Corinne Rydman on the music of Florence Price

I was in my second year of graduate school looking for recital repertoire when I discovered Florence B. Price and her music. No. Discover is the wrong verb. ...

cambridgefemalecomposers

'That has a gender? Of course it does.' Rachel Becker on Instruments and Gender

The nineteenth-century was a hot-bed of strongly gendered descriptions of woodwind instruments, their sounds, their performers, and their music. In 1851, the...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Nat Jobbins on playing with gender and music

When Virginia Woolf hand-sewed the bindings of over a thousand copies of Orlandoin 1928, she stood unflinchingly in front of The Canon and looked it square b...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Sarah MacDonald reflects on being the first female director of music at an Oxbridge college

I was Organ Scholar at Robinson College as an undergraduate from 1992-95, and after a brief subsequent sojourn in my native Canada, I returned to the UK in A...

cambridgefemalecomposers

Joanna Ward on achieving diversity through composing competitions

When I was approached to be a part of the Cambridge Female Composer Festival, having a role organising the composing competition seemed like the obvious way ...

cambridgefemalecomposers

A Festive Welcome From the Chairs!

The idea for this festival came from two annual recitals held in Christ’s chapel dedicated to music by female composers. We both loved the recitals and the b...