Forgotten Voices - Women in Song

Welcome to SWAP'ra Forgotten Voices - Women in Song

This project assembles information and resources to help artists and listeners discover more about the many women who wrote great art songs.

Here you will find information about these women and their compositional context as song composers, as well as audio/video recordings of selected songs, and links to access scores. 

We are aiming to grow this resource over time, including adding further recordings and texts and translations, and more information about contemporary women composers. As the project develops, we look forward to hearing from artists about their experience of programming and performing these women's songs.

We have picked out some featured composers listed below for you to get started. We hope this will whet your appetite to explore what we've included so far and the many more composers we will add further content and resources about in the future.

Led by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, this project is created in partnership with SWAP'ra, numerous contributing artists, and Professor Natasha Loges, Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.

SWAP’ra (Supporting Women and Parents in Opera) was established in 2018 to redress unconscious gender bias and to provide a supportive platform to effect positive change for women and parents who work in the opera and classical music industry.