Across the 2020-2021 orchestral season, a study of 100 orchestras in 27 countries by the Donne Foundation found that only five percent of music performed was written by women. Even as arts organisations take action to promote gender equality in a post-#MeToo era, there remains a stark imbalance in whose voices are considered worthy of the concert hall.

Music, She Wrote. Photo supplied

Music, She Wrote festival, presented by 3MBS and led by Artistic Director and 2022 Freedman Classical Fellowship winner Katie Yap, offers an antidote. The festival’s closing concert, REBEL, explored how women have perpetrated minor and major acts of rebellion, as musicians, as activists and as mothers, with a series of works that disavowed any notion that women lack the compositional capabilities of their male counterparts.

The festival string quartet, comprising local string powerhouses Kyla Matsuura-Miller and Emma Hunt on violins, Katie Yap on viola and Elina Faskhi on cello, consistently played with richness and conviction. The ensemble opened the first movement of Florence Price’s Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the Life of a Washerwoman with a warm, sumptuous crescendo, and chronicled the piece’s journey from morning...