“Throughout history, women have had to overcome major obstacles marked by gender differences,” wrote Gabriela Ortiz in a composer’s note in 2021. “We have gradually unfolded within the musical arts with great difficulty.”
The resilience modeled by Ortiz — a prominent Mexican composer who won this year’s Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition — also holds true for myriad other women who have made their mark across centuries of classical music. WRTI will honor them this weekend, in commemoration of International Women’s Day on March 8. Tune in to hear an expansive range of music composed by women from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and 3 to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Kicking off our programming on Saturday is a recording of Hildegard von Bingen’s “O virtus sapientiae” by the Lucerne Festival Strings. In addition to being a pioneering 12th-century composer, von Bingen was a polymath who engaged in philosophy, mysticism, medical writing and more. Bingen’s music will also begin our Sunday broadcast, with a performance of “Kyrieleison” by the celebrated medieval music ensemble Sequentia.
Among the new recordings we’re featuring is the BBC Philharmonic’s performance of Ruth Gipps’ Horn Concerto, Op. 58, from their 2025 album Gipps: Orchestral Works, Vol.3. Gipps, whose composing years picked up following a shoulder injury that ended her performing career, composed this concerto in 1968 for her son, Lance Baker. (The horn soloist in this recording is Martin Owen.)
Saturday’s broadcast will also feature an array of pieces by African-American composers Florence Price, Hazel Scott and Margaret Bonds. Price’s 1943 Concert Overture No. 2, which draws inspiration from traditional spirituals, will air shortly after 10 a.m., in a recording by the Wurttemberg Philharmonic Orchestra Reutlingen. Scott’s impressionistic “Idyll,” which walks the line between jazz and classical piano, will be featured at midday, in a recording by Lara Downes.
In the afternoon, close to the middle of the 4 o’clock hour, we’ll hear Bonds’ “Montgomery Variations,” as performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Bonds dedicated this piece to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with each of its seven movements based on key events in the Civil Rights Movement. Bonds’ music will be featured in the same time slot on Sunday, as we hear Michelle Cann’s solo piano recording of the Spiritual Suite, whose three movements are each based on a different spiritual.
Just after noon on Saturday, the broadcast will feature an aria from Amy Beach’s 1932 one-act opera Cabildo, set in a government building in New Orleans of the same name, with a plot that involves a tour group vividly dreaming of the pirate Pierre Lafitte. Performing the aria, “Ah, love is a jasmine vine,” are soprano Nicole Cabell and baritone Will Liverman, backed by violin, cello and piano.
Jennifer Higdon, a contemporary composer with deep history in Philadelphia — and close ties to several of our cultural institutions, notably the University of Pennsylvania and The Philadelphia Orchestra — is represented in our broadcast shortly before 10 a.m. on Saturday. Her “String Poetic: Nocturne” will be heard in a 2000 recording by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Reiko Uchida.
Other prominent contemporary composers — such as Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Caroline Shaw and Tania León — will be heard throughout both broadcasts. On Saturday, Thorvaldsdóttir’s “Hear us in the heavens,” sung by the Reykjavik Schola Cantorum, will be played shortly after 8 a.m. Shaw’s “and the swallow,” sung by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, will lead us into the 10 o’clock hour. And Sunday’s broadcast will feature León’s “Tumbao,” whose dancing Afro-Cuban rhythms were inspired in part by the salsa legend Celia Cruz; we’ll hear a performance by the Venezuelan-born pianist Elena Riu, who commissioned the piece.
Gabriela Ortiz’s composition “Kauyumari,” premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, will air shortly after 4:30 p.m. on Sunday. Among the Huichol people of Mexico, Kauyumari means “blue deer,” and represents a spiritual guide. Ortiz chose this as her totem for a piece commissioned to mark the orchestra’s return to the stage in 2021. “While composing this piece,” Ortiz writes, “I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible, healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound.”
Tune in from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday at 90.1 FM, or stream via wrti.org or the WRTI app.