By Emily Trubshaw Although many YouTube comments are encouraging and supportive of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s music, there is also a wide spread of those that criticise her ability to produce more than just a well-executed musical structure. Rather than moving her audience, Bacewicz is often perceived as being clinical and unoriginal. ‘Her generativity lacks…
Read MoreInspiring doctor: Dr Louise Newson
By Jess Anderson Dr Louise Newson is a GP and pioneering Menopause Specialist who is immensely passionate about increasing awareness and knowledge of perimenopause and menopause, and campaigns for better menopause care for all women. She runs the world’s largest menopause clinic, where she reinvests most profits to fund ground-breaking research and provide free menopause…
Read MoreInspiring composer: Margaret Bonds
By Kennedy Blair Miller For a long time, I struggled to believe my identities as a classical musician and an activist were compatible. The history of classical music is filled with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, so I sought out an alternate history – one where musicians used their art as a vessel for progress. Margaret…
Read MoreInspiring singer: Florence Foster Jenkins
By Jonty Watt If you have ever happened upon a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins’s singing, you might think she makes a remarkably strange choice of inspirational figure. Dubbed the ‘anti-Callas’ and ‘exquisitely bad’, her recordings of difficult operatic repertoire are, indeed, legendarily woeful. Her ‘Queen of the Night’ aria has racked up nearly two…
Read MoreSue Lawley – Broadcaster
By Declan Hickey There is no greater reservoir of satisfaction than the BBC Radio 4 archive, suffering only from its incompleteness. Fortunately, the channel’s enduring contribution to mankind, Desert Island Discs, is among its better-preserved programmes. Better still, the golden age of 1988–2006 survives fully intact, no record or luxury spared. Devoted listeners will know…
Read MoreInspiring Primatologist: Jane Goodall
By Kiersten Gustafson When Jane Goodall, primatologist and anthropologist, came to speak at my undergraduate university, I was prepared to be impressed; as a young woman, she had been a trailblazer in a male-dominated field, with her research on chimpanzees challenging common notions of what it meant to be human. I was not prepared, however,…
Read MoreInspiring DJ: Honey Dijon
By Toby Anderson 2022 was the year I started seriously thinking about house music. At the centre of that was the fabulous, ethereal, mesmerising DJ Honey Dijon. As a black trans woman, Dijon places the queer utopianism that gave birth to house music at the centre of her craft, weaving stories of queer empowerment and…
Read MorePauline Viardot: Inspirational Diva
By Mia Serracino-Inglott When we think of an inspirational woman, do we think of a ‘diva’? Certainly, the term diva has undergone quite the negative rebranding in recent years, often being used to describe women who are over-dramatic, bossy, or rude. But back in the opera houses of the nineteenth century, to be called a…
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