Our Festival was born of need, the need to celebrate the immeasurable beauty, strength, passion and excellence of music written by women. Because right now, the celebration, the opportunity, the recognition is not happening... not enough at least.

As at December 2019, we’re talking less than 5%.

Less than 5% of stage and radio performances is of music written by women.  

In classical music this statistic is true and in Indigenous music, in music composed for Games, in Film music and in Jazz, the stats are even worse.

Why?

Habit, perhaps?  Familiairity? 

Concert programmers program what they know.  They know that the music of Beethoven, Hans Zimmer or Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a Wonderful World’ is familiar and sure to attract an audience.

But what about the glorious hidden treasures written by Hildegard von Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn... and Deborah Cheetham, Jessica Wells, Anne Cawrse and Asuka Ota…

Sorry, Hildegard and Barbara and Deborah and Jessica and Anne and Asuka who?

Here we find the reason for our Festival. There are so many names, so many women who have written superb music since the 12th century at least, and yet their names are unknown and their music is too often unheard. But we are changing that…

Our first Festival

In March 2019, a wonderful community of 13 women composers, 29 musicians and 300 audience members came together to create the inaugural Women in Music Festival. We were answering a call, the call to showcase the music of women composers and to offer audiences the opportunity to hear for themselves why we should be supporting and celebrating this fabulous music. 

The Festival offered remarkable music by Gamilaroi and Weilwan singer/songwriter Rachel Shields, Jazz composer/ singer Michelle Nicolle, film composers Jessica Wells, Caitlin Yeo and Petra Salsjo, classical compositions by Sally Whitwell, Elena Kats-Chernon and others, a new Game by Maize Wallin and much, much more. 

The magnificent Yorta Yorta soprano Deborah Cheetham AO and the sublime Greta Bradman were two of the brilliant musicians who graced the stage at RMIT’s Storey Hall, coincidentally the home of Melbourne’s suffragettes as they fought to be granted the vote.    

We’re delivering our second Festival - March 6th, 7th and 8th 2020 - and we want YOU to be a part of it! 

Based on an inaugural Festival which one audience member described as "having emerged fully formed out of the blocks", we have some wonderful plans for 2020, and for our second Festival we want to partner with you to make our dream - to showcase music written by women - a reality.

Rewards: our thanks to YOU

One of the best parts of launching a Pozible campaign is the opportunity to thank YOU for participating in our Festival, by offering unique gifts and experiences at every funding level. We’ve loved putting together a wonderful list of rewards, including:

- the opportunity to perform in our Festival! If you join our open choir, you will rehearse with and be conducted by one of Australia’s most revered musicians. You will have the thrilling experience of singing in an enormous choir, and you will have a fabulous story to tell everyone you know for the rest of your life!

- the opportunity to attend the concert at bargain prices by taking advantage of our pre-sales ticket prices 

- the opportunity to commission your very own piece of music written by a woman and have your name go down in history!

Share and share again

We have less than 30 days to reach our $20,000 goal and as you probably know, Pozible is ALL OR NOTHING funding which means if we don't hit the funding goal, we won’t receive a dollar towards our second Festival.

So in addition to donating to the project, the most helpful thing you can do is to please SPREAD THE WORD! Whether it's reposting on Facebook or Instagram, sending an email to your friends and family, or just telling everyone you know, we so appreciate any help you can give in getting the word out.

Questions, comments or observations?

Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions about how this process works. We want you to feel completely confident in knowing exactly where your donation is going.

Thank you 

Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us, for giving generously, for spreading the word and for making it possible for us to showcase the magnificent music written by the women of this world.

With many, many thanks

Caroline Neeling

Founder

Women in Music Festival

Where will your money go?  

Our funding goal is $20,000 which will - together with $10,000 already committed by our wonderful friends at Big Ant Studios - cover the cost of one concert which will feature existing compositions by women, women such as 12th century composer Hildegard von Bingen, 17th century composer Barbara Strozzi and 19th century composer Clara Schumann. 

If we surpass this goal and reach our first stretch target of $45,000, we will be able to feature not only some fabulous living composers including Deborah Cheetham, Sally Whitwell, Shauntai Batzke and Biddy Connor, but we will also be able to commission new compositions, offering two concerts as we did in 2019. These concerts will feature world premiere performances, all of which will be filmed and posted on our YouTube Education Portal, for the use of concert programmers and music educators across the world.

And if we reach our second stretch goal of $65,000, we will hold a third concert which will feature five new compositions – one in each genre – written by emerging women/non-binary composers, whom we hope will never experience the lack of performance recognition endemic to their older sisters.

$20,000 BUDGET

$13,000 – Performing musicians

$3,000 –   Music license fees

$1,000 –   Website and social media

$1,000 –   Pozible (fees etc)

$2,000 –   Miscellaneous but important things (security, meals and travel for musicians, and more)

With your generous support, we're hopeful we can meet and even surpass our aim of recreating and even outdoing the scope of our first Festival, which was created with hours and hours of donated time offered by dozens of people, whom we thank from the bottom of our hearts.

We at the Women in Music Festival are so grateful for the generous support you offer to music written by women. We can't wait to work with all of YOU to make this second Festival a reality.