She’s an OBE recipient and Grammy nominee — but that doesn’t stop people from saying very silly things to composer Debbie Wiseman. 

“I wrote music for an action film and performed it live, and I remember people saying to me afterwards, ‘I can’t believe you’re tiny and a woman and you write this powerful music with all the brass and percussion’… like I’d have to be really really big and fat and strong in order to write big music… that’s just a ludicrous thing.” 

Wiseman recalls the experience as she speaks about the artists featured in Sounds & Sweet Airs, her new eight-part series for Classic FM exploring female composers through the ages. 

Rebecca Clarke, she says, was an early 20th-century violist who “won a really important prize, and [the jury] couldn’t believe that the work had actually been submitted by a woman… and I think the fact that people think women can’t write powerful music is still quite a thing.”

Wiseman is hoping her series, based on Anna Beer’s book of the same name, will change that attitude by focusing on women who “dared to compose” like Clarke, Imogen Holst, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn.

“Fanny Mendelssohn is kind of a hero of mine,” Wiseman says of the Jewish pianist, sister to Felix. “I’ll be playing quite a lot of her beautiful music.”

“She was just as talented as Felix… she was even compared to J S Bach, but she wasn’t given the encouragement that Felix was given and so we know a lot of Felix’s music but less about Fanny.” 
Wiseman, who is Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, will also be interviewing living female composers throughout the eight episodes. 

“We’re not just looking back, we’re looking forward,” she says. 

While she acknowledges “there is still work to be done”, Wiseman is encouraged by the growing number of role models,  working not only in the concert hall, but in film and TV. 

There are also “lots of female musicians in orchestras playing instruments that were normally a male domain, like trumpets…trombones… percussion and tuba, and all those instruments usually you’d only ever see men playing.

“Not just flute and harp and what would be traditionally called sort of ‘feminine’ instruments, but all the big brassy instruments as well.” 

So now it’s OK for women to be loud? She laughs. “Exactly! Well, I think there is something about, you’re feminine, you’ve got to be very quiet and demure… and so, playing loud instruments goes against people’s perceptions.”

She hopes the series will shift preconceptions about female composers.

“This whole series is about creativity against the odds and finding a way to get the women’s music out there so it can be heard… when you hear it, you cannot believe it’s been tucked away."

‘Sounds & Sweet Airs’ premiers on Classic FM on September 7 at 9pm.