In 1910, after meeting Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the British composer Ethel Smyth dedicated two years of her life to the campaign to secure women’s right to vote. During this time, she composed “The March of the Women,” a piece that would become a defining anthem of the suffrage movement.
Even while serving a brief stint in London’s Holloway Prison — a consequence of smashing the window of a government official opposed to suffrage — Smyth advanced her theme. “Legend has it that while in Holloway,” writes Cait Miller, in a 2022 essay for the Library of Congress, “Smyth conducted through her prison cell using a toothbrush, as her fellow suffragists sang her beloved march in the prison yard.”
Violinist Esther Abrami’s recent arrangement of “The March of the Women,” which interpolates a speech by Pankhurst, will appear near the top of our Sunday Classical broadcast on March 8, observed as International Women’s Day. From 3 to 6 p.m., host Meg Bragle will feature music by women composers, across a wide stylistic range.
The historical sweep of the broadcast will take us as far back as the 17th century, when the Venetian composer and singer Barbara Strozzi was creating impressive volumes of Baroque works without the benediction of the church. We'll hear a recording of her piece "Che si può fare?" ("What can you do?") arranged for voice and chamber ensemble by conductor Christina Pluhar, with soprano Céline Scheen.
We’ll also hear 19th century music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel — who, like her younger brother Felix Mendelssohn, was both a talented performer and a prolific composer, though most of her 450 works were unpublished during her lifetime. Her Piano Quartet in A-flat Major will uplift the program in a recording by Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective.
But this special edition of Sunday Classical will hardly be limited by a historical frame, featuring a handful of prominent artists of our time. They include the British composers Rachel Portman and Julie Cooper and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Jennifer Higdon, who has long had ties to Philadelphia.
We’ll also hear from violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, a founding member of PUBLIQuartet, recently named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year. Montgomery, who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended Juilliard, maintains a commitment to folk and vernacular traditions in her classical compositional practice — a synthesis you can hear clearly in “Strum,” the piece we’ll hear during the 4 o’clock hour, in a recording by the Catalyst Quartet.
“Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement,” Montgomery writes in a program note, “the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”