Following a sold-out inaugural festival in 2021, 3MBS proudly presents Music, She Wrote on 6 – 8 April 2022.

Held over three nights at the stunning ALPHA60 Chapter House on Flinders Lane in Melbourne’s CBD, the festival will feature a whole new line-up of Melbourne’s most celebrated, imaginative and engaging classical, baroque and folk musicians.

Single tickets are available for each of the three nights or purchase a festival pass and save on all three. All concerts are 90 minutes long including interval.

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Concert 1: RESTORE
Wednesday 6 April, 8pm

The first concert rediscovers things we’ve lost over the last two years – the vibrant energy of life’s bubbling rhythm, and voices raised together in song.

Firecracker flautist Eliza Shephard doesn’t beat around the bush in smashing stereotypes of female composers’ music in her opening set! There’s not a whiff of quiet domestic wallflower in her solo set, Bring the Beat Back, filled with driving rhythms and wild exuberance.

Following Eliza is the sublime Consort of Melbourne, who will set the vaulted ceilings of Chapter House ringing with their six-piece a-capella line up. Their concert celebrates the music written by women against all odds. From some of the first published female composers, to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann who sacrificed their own careers for their families, to contemporary Australian and British composers.

Concert 2: RENEW
Thursday 7 April, 8pm

The second concert celebrates humanity’s ability to reinvent itself.

Acclaimed baroque harpist Hannah Lane and soprano Chloe Lankshear explore Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that for most of history, Anonymous was a woman. These acclaimed musicians take you back in time when women created in secret, alongside their sisters who could write under their own names – Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Campana, and Lucretia Orsina Vizana.

Then, we travel forward 500 years and half a world away, to the here and now. Known for their warmth of character, toe-tapping tunes, and genius harmonies, folk duo Big Fiddle Little Fiddle will leave you with a sense that perhaps, our world is a little brighter than how it might have seemed before.

Concert : REBEL
Friday 8 April, 8pm

Long thought of as the weaker, gentler sex, society has always condemned women who rebel. Now, we see a wave of women who refuse to smile and accept their lot – Grace Tame, Rosy Batty, Brittany Higgins, amongst so many others.

This concert celebrates rebellion in all its forms – internal, external, peaceful or not. Artistic director Katie Yap has assembled a festival string quartet especially for this concert, bringing together Kyla Matsuura-Miller and Emma Hunt (violins), Katie Yap (viola), and Elina Faskhi (cello). Beginning with one of the US’s first published black female composers, Florence Price, they take on works by trailblazing Australian composers Elena Kats Chernin, Hilary Kleinig and Emily Sheppard, finishing with the furiously triumphant fourth string quartet of Grazyna Bacewicz.


Music, She Wrote is proudly supported by:

Image of Eliza Shephard by Mark Lobo