The 2025 Women Composers Festival of Hartford will be held on Friday & Saturday, February 28th and March 1st, 2025.
With gratitude to our hosts at Central Connecticut State University, we warmly invite and welcome all attendees to join us in filling Founders Hall with the incredible music of women composers!
Our 2025 Ensemble-in-Residence will be Excelsis Percussion, and our 2025 Composer-in-Residence will be Leah Reid!
We are now accepting applications for our 2025 Call for Scores (Percussion Quartet), Music Marathon, and Scholarly Symposium, due on Sunday, September 8th, 2024, as well as applications for our Composition Workshop, due on Sunday, September 29th, 2024. Please see our Artist Opportunities page to access applications!
The Women Composers Festival of Hartford promotes the music of contemporary and historical women composers.
We embrace diversity of race, ethnicity, and ability, and empower artists from underrepresented groups who identify as women, including transgender and gender-fluid individuals, women of color, indigenous groups, LGBTQ, and the differently abled.
We warmly invite and welcome all attendees. Our annual Festival is accessible for all those with mobility, visual, and/or hearing impairments.
2025 Composer-in-Residence:
Leah Reid
Leah Reid is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music, to acousmatic, electroacoustic works, and interactive sound installations.
Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize, first prizes in the International “New Vision” Composition Competition, the KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition and Musicworks’ Electronic Music Competition, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Oliveros Award, and second prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and the International Destellos Competition.
Reid has worked with and received commissions from ensembles such as Accordant Commons, Blow Up Percussion, Concavo & Convesso, Ensemble Móbile, Guerilla Opera, the Jack Quartet, McGill’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, Neave Trio, Sound Gear, Talea, and Yarn/Wire.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Virginia.
2025 Ensemble-in-Residence:
Excelsis Percussion
Hailed as “One of the most innovative and exciting percussion ensembles to emerge in the golden age of chamber music” (Jonathan Haas, New York University) for their immersive sound world, New York City-based Excelsis Percussion Quartet is Marcelina Suchocka (Poland), Aya Kaminaguchi (Japan), Britton-René Collins (United States), and Mariana Ramirez (Mexico).
This international group of women with a multilingual combination of five languages join together to speak the universal language of rhythm, rooted in their belief that music possesses an ability to unite us all. Excelsis brings vibrancy to the percussion community through eclectic programming, innovative storytelling, and embracing their intersectional identities.
Excelsis’ breadth of repertoire spans from classical to avant-garde. As advocates for multi-genre representation and equality in chamber music programming, Excelsis charms audiences with versatile and uniquely innovative concert experiences. Excelsis proudly endorses Sabian Cymbals and Pearl/Adams instruments.
Britton-René Collins 
Aya Kaminaguchi 
Marcelina Suchocka 
Mariana Ramirez
When you make a tax-deductible donation to the Women Composers Festival of Hartford, your money directly supports the creation, promotion, and performance of women’s music.
2023 Feature Concert
Spotlight:
Previous Festival Awardees
Whistling Hens’ debut album, Reacting to the Landscape, includes nine world premiere recordings of works by seven living American women composers. Showcasing five commissions, soprano Jennifer Piazza-Pick and clarinetist Natalie Groom masterfully present a wide variety of styles, sounds, and stories.
The album title, Reacting to the Landscape, comes from an interview with former Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop (the first female to lead a major orchestra in the U.S.).
Read more about the Whistling Hens and their album on our Spotlight page, and you can purchase the album here.
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