EMPOWER presents Mountain Airs, an evening of music by women composers exploring landscapes, identity, and memory.

Founded in 2021 by musicians Hannah Seymour and Sinéad Walsh, EMPOWER is a platform championing women's voices in music through performance, commissioning, advocacy and community. What began as a grassroots concert series has grown into a national platform supporting emerging musicians and women composers through high-profile performances, new commissions, industry conversations and collaborative projects across the UK and Ireland.

For Mountain Airs, EMPOWER brings together a programme that moves between musical and natural environments. Danish-British composer Emily Pedersen's Coastlines reflects her longstanding interest in relationships between music, place and the natural world, while Francesca Le Lohé's No More Girl Friday brings together music and moving image. The programme continues with Samantha Fernando's Kinesphere for solo flute, Judith Weir's Airs from Another Planet, Pernille Faye's Embers and Louise Farrenc's Sextet in C minor for Winds and Piano, creating a musical landscape that stretches from the intimate to the expansive, and from contemporary voices to the nineteenth-century repertoire.

Event programme

Emily Pedersen: Coastlines

Francesca Le Lohé (b. 1990): No More Girl Friday, video edited by Sherie Sitauze

Samantha Fernando (b. 1984): Kinesphere for solo flute

Judith Weir (b. 1954): Airs from Another Planet

Pernille Faye (b. 2002): Embers

Louise Farrenc (1804–1875): Sextet in C minor for Winds and Piano

About the featured artists

Emily Pedersen is a Danish-British composer born and raised in Thailand and Malaysia, whose work explores relationships between music, place and the natural world, with particular interests in ecological storytelling, environmental sound and marine bioacoustics. Her music has been written for ensembles including ORA Singers, the Piatti Quartet and the Hallé Orchestra, and she made her Bridgewater Hall debut in 2024 as recipient of the RNCM's annual Symphony Orchestra commission.

Composer and community musician Francesca Le Lohé works across the UK and Japan, creating ambitious projects that bring together music, different disciplines and cultures. Her work includes community opera, new music for traditional Japanese instruments and immersive, site-specific performance. She was an LSO Soundhub Associate from 2022 to 2024 and is also Project Manager at Contemporary Music for All, which supports musicians of all abilities to participate actively in contemporary music.

The performers are Sinéad Walsh (flute), Hannah Seymour (oboe/cor anglais), Hannah Shimwell (clarinet), Alice Knight (French horn), Jamie King (bassoon) and Archie Bonham (piano).

Car parking

When you arrive for a College event at our Egham campus, please park in car parks 12 or 4.

Car park 12 can be accessed by turning right as you enter the main College gates and is located next to the tennis courts. If this car park is full, please drive further onto our campus to car park 4, which can be accessed by turning left at the mini-roundabout behind the Students’ Union. We would advise that you bring the College map to campus with you and give yourself plenty of time to park.

Blue Badge holders can find designated parking spaces in Car park 1W, as well as between Gardeners Lodge and the Williams Annexe. You can find these locations by looking at our campus map opposite. If you require any assistance on arrival, please contact our premises team in advance of your visit by emailing: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk and they will be happy to help.

Please note that we operate an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system on certain parts of our campus, however if you are here for an organised event, parking is unrestricted for event guests in car parks 12, 4 or 14 (or display your blue badge permit if parking in a disabled bay). If you have any questions about parking, please email: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk

Description supplied by the event organiser.