Meet the two composers leading the charge for women at the Proms: 'It’s time to redress centuries of injustice' 

Composers Roxana Panufnik and Anna Meredith at the Royal Albert Hall
Composers Roxana Panufnik and Anna Meredith at the Royal Albert Hall Credit: David Rose

Roxanna Panufnik and Anna Meredith are among the 22 female composers set to feature in the Proms this year. They tell Ivan Hewett why it's about time

Finally, after 223 years of Proms history, women have taken centre stage. More than half of the newly commissioned pieces in this year’s season are by women, and altogether there are 22 female composers featured throughout the festival. It’s a bold signal of intent that when it comes to new music, the Proms is aiming to right years of male dominance. And in a nice piece of symbolism, it’s two female composers who have been given the most eye-catching commissions of all, for the First and Last Night.

Sharing the honours of bookending the Proms may be almost the only thing Roxanna Panufnik and Anna Meredith have in common. Panufnik is deeply Catholic, exquisitely turned out, serene, with a cut-glass accent, and in recent years has taken to writing pieces suffused with the chant of the three Abrahamic faiths of the Middle East. The new piece she’s created for the Last Night is a case in point. “I got a very detailed brief,” she tells me when I meet both composers at the Royal Albert Hall. “They wanted something that commemorated the centenary of the end of the First World War but also looked optimistically into the future.” 

What she came up with was a piece entitled Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light for choirs and orchestra. In this, a poem by Isaac Rosenberg, full of what Panufnik calls “spooky” anticipations of life in the trenches, is “soothed and assuaged” by verses from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. The music symbolises the meeting of cultures, with Syrian Maronite Christian chant intermingled with Sufi dance rhythms. 

Anna Meredith, by contrast, is casually dressed, and all nervous energy, doubting every assertion and constantly glancing skywards while she reaches for the right word. She’s someone who’s equally at home with pop music (her debut album Varmints won a string of awards in 2016), or writing music for a fashion show or massed children’s choirs – or the Proms. 

Anna Meredith
Anna Meredith

Her commissioned piece for the First Night, Five Telegrams, which is a music-and-visuals piece made in collaboration with hi-tech designers 59 Productions, also marks the ending of the First World War, but Meredith was determined to avoid a mournful sepia-tinted tone. What eventually emerged was a piece in five movements, each focused on an aspect of communication between soldiers and loved ones at home, each with a suggestive title: Spin, Postcard Home, Redaction, Codes, Armistice. “There’s no feeling of triumph or joy at the end, because that’s not the impression I got of how soldiers actually felt,” says Meredith. “it’s more a sense of dogged, heavy persistence.”

It’s not just at the BBC that the winds of change are being felt. The PRS Foundation has launched a campaign named Keychange, which aims to ensure that half of all commissions for new pieces are offered to female composers by 2020. Musical organisations have been falling over themselves to sign up, but the Proms is actually ahead of the game. Clearly something has changed, and I wonder whether Panufnik and Meredith have seen it happen during their own careers. Was it difficult starting out in the Nineties? 

“I found it very exciting, actually,” says Panufnik, “because there really were so few of us female composers at that time. I was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and I would say less than 10 per cent of the composer students were women. I found it helped me to stand out from the crowd – I actually enjoyed being different in that way and made the most of it. I enjoyed people being surprised to discover I was a woman, and not fitting what people thought a composer should look like.” 

Anna Meredith agrees that the lack of female role models was not a problem. “My problem was not being a female composer as such, it was more to do with working out who I was as a composer artistically, which was difficult because I felt I did not fit.”

Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik

Panufnik points out that the difficulties female composers face are as much practical as aesthetic – which she knows all about, having raised three teenage children with her banker husband at their home in south-west London. “The point in your career when it becomes extremely challenging is when you have children. It’s not just difficult for composers. Female opera singers are often told that if they have children it will ruin their voice and generally destroy their prospects. There’s very little support for female artists in any genre who have children, and they need it because they don’t have a salary and often can’t afford childcare. It annoys me that the cost of a PA can be offset against tax, but not the cost of childcare.” 

Anna Meredith believes it is time to tackle ingrained sexism. “I’ve heard so many people say, ‘it’s got to be on merit’, or ‘I just want the best person for the job’, or ‘I don’t see gender’, but when you actually look at the music world there are countless examples of unconscious biases, and until we address those our musical culture won’t be as rich and diverse as it could be.”

But this bothers Panufnik. “I really worry for young male composers at the moment, I think a really brilliant young male composer could be overlooked.” Does she think that’s a real possibility? “I do, actually, but I worry more that it could cause resentment and divide male and female composers into rival camps, which I think would be a bad thing. 

Roxana Panufnik and Anna Meredith
Roxana Panufnik and Anna Meredith Credit: David Rose

“So often I’m told by a performer, ‘We’re going to do this all-female programme of works, do you want to be part of it?’, and I think, ‘do we really want all-female programmes?’” 

Anna Meredith doesn’t agree. “I know what you mean but the good thing about all-female events is that it gives a very prominent platform to women, which could persuade some sceptics that women after all can write decent music. I wonder if maybe a short period of celebrating women composers in a way that gives them prominence for a limited period could be a good thing, even though none of us in the long term want anything more than an equal share of the cake. 

“A few years of redressing centuries of injustice doesn’t seem unjust to me.”

Five Telegrams by Anna Meredith/59 Productions is premiered at the First Night of the Proms tomorrow. Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light by Roxanna Panufnik is premiered at the Last Night of the Proms on Sept 8. Tickets: 020 7070 4441. You can listen to the Proms on BBC Radio 3

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