Well at least one we hope: Kerry Andrew, the head judge of our very own Walter Hussey Composition Competition.
Did you see her recently when we lent her out to the BBC as Chair of the Judging Panel for Young Musician of the Year 2018, not only on the live broadcast of the Final, but also on BBC Breakfast with the winner Lauren Zhang, who played the fiendishly difficult Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto?
Kerry Andrew said,
‘Lauren’s performance left us all breathless! Her exceptional level of technical skill and intelligent musicality shone through in a beast of a piece. We see great things in her future!’
The eagled-eyed among you may have noticed a theme to the names on Kerry Andrew’s t-shirt. How many of those names do you recognise, what did they do, and in what era did they live? (Answers below)
If you are interested in trying to spot the contemporary talent then here are the names of seven women who were recently identified by the Evening Standard as London’s brightest female composers:
Anna Meredith, Hannah Kendall, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Dobrinka Tabakova (also an adjudicator at BBC Young Musician), Kate Whitley, Lucy Pankhurst and of course – Kerry Andrew.
And as for the t-shirt…
Answers: Sappho (born c. 612 BCE), Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), Amy Beach (1867-1944), Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), Florence Beatrice Price (1887–1953), Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983), Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016).
…all composers if you hadn’t guessed!