• Mirabilis Collective, whose Hear Her Now festival runs October 8–19.
AUSTRALIA’S first chamber music festival devoted entirely to music by women launches in Perth next month.
Held over 12 days, Hear Her Now features more than 100 diverse works from female composers and songwriters.
Highlights include VIVID, a concert showcasing queer and disabled composers, and Homegrown, featuring intergenerational music with 16-year-old violist Jessica Casey and septuagenarians Jan Smith and Kay Weaver, who wrote music for the Wheatbelt Song Project.
Diverse
If that wasn’t enough, there’ll be four world premieres by WA composers and music spanning nine centuries.
The festival is the brainchild of Mirabilis Collective, a Perth chamber ensemble who perform music by women.
Formed in 2023, they’ve already held three annual concert series, but wanted to do “something with real scope and scale that would draw attention to just how broad the repertoire by women actually is”.
In recent years, women have been making inroads into the notoriously stuffy, male-dominated world of composing and conducting classical music.
“We are seeing more women conducting major orchestras, more women composers being commissioned, and more organisations thinking seriously about whose music they put on stage,” says Stephanie Nicholls, artistic director of Mirabilis Collective.
Contemporary
“Western Australia has some terrific women conductors flying the flag. Jessica Gethin is Principal Conductor of West Australian Ballet and has conducted orchestras across Australia and internationally; Jen Winley is WASO’s Associate Conductor; and Sara Duhig is building a strong national conducting career after emerging through WA programs. Conductors including Laurissa Brooke have also been part of that growing local presence.”
But Nicholls says repertoire is still lagging behind.
“Hannah Lee Tungate from Tenth Muse Initiative has been tracking programming by Australian state orchestras, and in 2025 works by women made up around 14.5 per cent of the music programmed, up from 11.9 per cent the year before. That is encouraging, but it also shows how far there is still to go,” says Nicholls, who is an examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board and rewrote the national AMEB oboe syllabus to include more music by women.
The casual classical music fan will probably name-check Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi, but struggle to name a female composer from the golden era.
So were they around and why didn’t they get any recognition?
“The problem was not an absence of women writing music; it was the enormous social and professional barriers around them,” Nicholls says.
“Women were often encouraged to learn music as an accomplishment, but pursuing it professionally was another matter. Public performance, publication, formal positions and professional networks were much less accessible to women.
“Fanny Mendelssohn is a striking example. She wrote more than 500 works, but her father told her that while music might become her brother Felix’s profession, for her it should only be an ‘ornament’.”
Hear Her Now features 20 new chamber arrangements, as well as music ranging from Barbara Strozzi in the 17th century to contemporary songwriters like Angie McMahon and Chappell Roan. Nicholls is particularly excited about VIVID, which includes the premiere of a new string quartet by emerging WA composer Rose Russell.
“There are so many different entry points into the festival, but I think audiences will be especially excited by the amount of new music being created here in WA.”
Hear Her Now is on October 8–19 at venues across Perth including the State Library Theatre. For tix see mirabiliscollective.com.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK