Week 2: Building gender diverse programmes
Introduction
On International Women’s Day (8 March) in 2017 sisters Róisín and Clíona Maher founded the Finding A Voice Music Festival – an annual festival celebrating music by women composers – in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary (ROI). Now the sisters have built up such a strong audience for women’s music that up to 700 people attend the festival in this small Irish town every year.
In Week 1, you learned how classical music repertoire came to be so male dominated, what some of the challenges are to changing this (including access to scores of women’s compositions and nervousness around performing works with which audiences might be unfamiliar), and what some of the potential solutions to these challenges might be, such as researching and playing works by historical women composers or commissioning new works from living ones. This week, you will consider how you can go about building gender diverse programmes, or programmes which are even more diverse if you are already working in this area. This week is illustrated by a short interview with Roísín Maher, founder and director of the Finding a Voice Music Festival in the Republic of Ireland, who discusses her work running an all-woman music festival and advocating for greater gender equity within the Irish music industry.
By the end of this week, you should be able to:
- know some of the strategies which you could use to create gender diverse programmes, such as all-women concerts or themed programmes
- be aware of some of the issues which are important to consider when developing gender diverse programmes, including the timing and placement of women’s works
- understand some of the practical considerations which you’ll need to take into account when developing gender diverse programmes, including funding, audience engagement and outreach, and getting performers on board.