Donne - Women in Music

Donne - Women in Music The Global Voice for Women in Music 🌍 | Empowering Women. Celebrating Creativity. Reshaping Music 🎶 | Founded by ✨

She spent decades making room for women in an industry that didn't always make room for itself.Remembering Dolly Parton,...
08/09/2026

She spent decades making room for women in an industry that didn't always make room for itself.

Remembering Dolly Parton, and the doors she left open.

07/09/2026

Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE knows exactly why classical orchestras rarely reflect the diversity of the cities they perform in — and it isn't talent. It's access.

In this interview, she speaks candidly about how the lack of support for music education in state schools shuts young Black, Asian and ethnically diverse musicians out of classical music before they've even had the chance to begin.

So in 2015, she did something about it. Chi-chi founded Chineke! Foundation, home to Europe's first majority-Black, Asian and ethnically diverse orchestra — creating real career pathways, mentorship and a stage for musicians who were told there wasn't room for them.

Her message is simple: talent is everywhere.
Opportunity isn't. Chineke! exists to close that gap.

She was the first Mozart the world fell for. Then the world moved on to her brother — and stopped asking what happened t...
02/09/2026

She was the first Mozart the world fell for. Then the world moved on to her brother — and stopped asking what happened to her.

26/08/2026

Honestly? Rockstar checks out.

💫🤟🏻

25/08/2026

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose." Dolly Parton said that, and then spent all 80 years of her life proving it — rhinestones, wigs, business empire and all.

Rest in peace, queen.

Jocy de Oliveira is one of the pioneering figures of experimental and multimedia music internationally.Her extraordinary...
24/08/2026

Jocy de Oliveira is one of the pioneering figures of experimental and multimedia music internationally.

Her extraordinary career brought her into direct artistic dialogue with Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen and John Cage, Luciano Berio, amongst others.

She turned 90 this year.

Just over two months before the world premiere of her new opera at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, the production was cancelled.

Jocy responded with this letter.

She asks:

“Would this have happened if I were a man? If I were American or European? If the language of my work were a copy of 19th-century bel canto rather than contemporary?”

These are Jocy’s words, translated from Portuguese.

Read them. Share them. Discover Jocy de Oliveira

24/08/2026

ONE STAGE CLOSED. LET’S SEE HOW MANY WE CAN OPEN.

turned 90 this year. This should have been a year of celebration.

One of the pioneering figures of experimental and multimedia music internationally, her extraordinary career brought her into direct artistic dialogue with Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.

Just over two months before the world premiere of her new opera at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, the production was cancelled.

I don’t know if one voice can reopen one stage. But there are a lot of stages in the world.

If you’re a musician, play Jocy. If you programme, programme Jocy.

If you are a journalist tell her story.

And if all you can do today is share this, share it with someone who has a stage.

What can your stage do?

She wrote an opera performed at the Met before most orchestras would even program a woman. She also went to prison for t...
21/08/2026

She wrote an opera performed at the Met before most orchestras would even program a woman. She also went to prison for the right to vote — and got her fellow inmates singing her anthem from a jail cell, toothbrush in hand as a baton.

History mostly remembers Ethel Smyth as "the suffragette composer," like the two things were separate. They weren't. The same defiance that got her into Leipzig against her father's wishes is the defiance that got her into Holloway Prison decades later.

Some women just don't do "one or the other."

A new archive is documenting what classical music spent decades pretending not to see.
20/08/2026

A new archive is documenting what classical music spent decades pretending not to see.

One sister was told she'd broken the rules. The other broke a 200-year-old barrier because of it.Nadia Boulanger gave up...
19/08/2026

One sister was told she'd broken the rules. The other broke a 200-year-old barrier because of it.

Nadia Boulanger gave up her own composing career to make sure her younger sister got the recognition the world almost denied them both. What came next changed music history twice over — once through a prize, and once through seven decades of teaching some of the 20th century's greatest composers.

🎼 Swipe to meet Nadia and Lili Boulanger.

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