2025-26

Commissions and Training for Women Music Creators to Create Guitar Music

IGF’s annual project La Leona: Women and the Guitar, offers commissions and training for Women Music Creators to create guitar music.

Through La Leona, IGF is encouraging young women composers who are taking their early steps in establishing their careers as composers, giving them the opportunity to work through the full creation process, offering support through collaboration with the performer and finally guaranteeing a première and repeat performances in important concert venues, such as Kings Place.

IGF La Leona’s Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
The initiative to establish the La Leona project is part of a mindset that IGF has followed from its earliest days, always commissioning composers, without a blinkered view of their sex, race or background. IGF has commissioned over 110 works for the guitar solo and guitar in ensemble and the range of composers has always been inclusive.

Upcoming premieres during Guitar Summit, 2025

Cheryl
Frances-Hoad

Admired for her originality, fluency and professionalism, Cheryl Frances-Hoad has been composing to commission since she was fifteen. Classical tradition (she trained as a cellist and pianist at the Menuhin School before going on to Cambridge and King’s College, London) along with diverse contemporary inspirations including literature, painting and dance, have contributed to a creative presence provocatively her own. “Intricate in argument, sometimes impassioned, sometimes mercurial, always compelling in its authority” (Robin Holloway, The Spectator), her output – widely premiered, broadcast and commercially recorded, reaching audiences from the Proms to outreach workshops – addresses all genres from opera, ballet and concerto to song, chamber and solo music.

Laila
Arafah

Laila Arafah is a London-based composer whose works are often interdisciplinary and site-specific, centering on intimacy, temporality and the phenomena of resonance and decay.

Recent commissions have come from London Symphony Orchestra, Explore Ensemble and LCMF, Talea Ensemble, Zone Expérimentale Basel, Carducci Quartet, London Mozart Players, Roadrunner Trio, Quatuor Bozzini, Centre for Deep Listening and Westminster Abbey’s Commonwealth Day Service. She has also written for the, Dartington Music Festival, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Ensemble of Independent Musicians, ACA Orchestra, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Warsaw’s AżTak Festival, Boston New Music Initiative, the Soundways Festival (Russia), zone expérimentale basel (Austria), Aldeburgh Festival Podcast, Purcell Symphony Orchestra, Tchaikovsky-city Academy London Sinfonietta, and Fika Duo among many others. Laila is currently CoMA London’s Composer-in-Residence.

Kristina
Arakelyan

Kristina Arakelyan’s work as composer, pianist and educator is guided by a clear vision of music’s intrinsic power and purpose. An Armenian-British, prize-winning musician, her compositions are hallmarked by their striking beauty and compelling emotional honesty. Kristina’s studies as composer and pianist were nurtured at the Purcell School, the Royal Academy of Music, the University of Oxford and King’s College, London under the guidance of Sir George Benjamin. In recent years, her music has been performed at some of the world’s leading venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Southbank Centre and the Wigmore Hall in London, Symphony Hall Birmingham, Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall in the United States. Commissions have been written for Britten Pears Snape Maltings, BBC Proms, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Paul’s Cathedral, BBC Singers, Alison Balsom and Huddersfield Choral Society. An accomplished pianist, in February 2025 Kristina performed the world premiere of her Piano Concerto in Yerevan with the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra. 2025 also sees the release of Dreamland, her debut solo album as composer and pianist for Apple Music’s Platoon label. Toccata for organ and orchestra will receive its world premiere in May 2025 at the Royal Albert Hall, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by André de Ridder, and organist Anna Lapwood.

Isabella
Gellis

Isabella Gellis is a British-Canadian composer of acoustic music. With tactility, play, and manipulation of perception at its core, her work often focuses on imagined and disguised sounds, steeped in the silly, absurd, and surreal.

Recent commissions include works for the London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 12 Ensemble, Shadwell Opera and Aspen Music Festival.

Freya
Waley-Cohen

Described as ‘at once intimate and visionary’, Freya Waley-Cohen has been commissioned by ensembles including Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Proms, Wigmore Hall, Philharmonia Orchestra, and Britten Sinfonia. 2025/26 orchestral premieres include a Violin Concerto for Tamsin Waley-Cohen commissioned by BBC NOW, Aldeburgh Festival and Philharmonie Luxembourg, and a new work for Lucie Horsch and Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. Spell Book, Waley-Cohen’s debut album, was released in 2024 on NMC Recordings and described by BBC Music Magazine as “sophisticated, contemporary and feminist- even quite confronting”. Waley-Cohen has previously held roles including Composer-in-Residence with London Chamber Orchestra (2021/22) and Associate Composer at Wigmore Hall (2019/20). She currently lives in London.

Composing for the Guitar for the First Time
A number of the La Leona composers are writing for the guitar for the first time. The guitar is notoriously difficult to compose for and many a mainstream composer would shy away from the daunting task. That is another reason for IGF to be working with young composers, catching them early in their careers. The importance of this for creating a significant twenty-first-century repertoire should not be underestimated. This is an invaluable opportunity for young composers but equally so for the young IGF YAP performers, who will be premièring their works. IGF Young Artist Platform (YAP) guitarists are also offered support in the process of preparing a new work with a composer for a première.

Post-Première Performances of IGF Commissioned Works
Another important part of IGF commissioning new repertoire is the continuing support given to these commissions after their première. IGF has established a searchable database of all its commissions, over its 28-year history, to encourage guitarists throughout the world to play these works. More locally, IGF requests that all the young performers in their Young Artist Platform and Aspire programmes include some repertoire from the IGF commissions in their concerts. In this way, these newly commissioned works are slowly developing a life of their own in the classical guitar contemporary canon.

The IGF Archive
As the La Leona project was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, it has had to adopt Zoom meetings for composers and performers to discuss the work before its première. This has created an important video archive for future performers, who would like to perform these commissions, offering them some insider information on the beginnings of the composition and assisting them in creating an interpretation that stays closely with the composer’s musical intentions.

La Leona and Venus
The impetus behind La Leona project is the same that drove Tom Kerstens to create the IGF Venus and the Guitar project two years ago with landmark performances. Venus and the Guitar was part of Kings Place’s year-long Venus Unwrapped, a celebration which ‘focuses on the creative firepower of women composers’ – ‘it aims to reclaim her-story in music and inspire the next generation’. Venus and the Guitar was part of the 15th London Guitar Festival, Kings Place in October 2019.

The guitar world in classical, rock and jazz has seen relatively few women players celebrated, but in the flamenco world, there has almost been a taboo on women being flamenco guitarists – so IGF made history when, on Friday 25 October 2019, Venus and the Guitar featured three female flamenco guitarists: Antonia Jiménez, Bettina Flater and Afra Rubino, performing with the flamenco singer Alicia Morales from Granada, and another rarity, a female flamenco percussionist, Nasrine Rahmani – making it an all-female flamenco ensemble.

To give some perspective on IGF’s dedication to commissioning repertoire, the special Venus and the Guitar concert on Sunday 27 October 2019 featured the première of music by Errollyn Wallen for Tom Kerstens’ G Plus Ensemble as well as many of the IGF’s earlier commissions by Women composers. The programme also included Errollyn Wallen’s works – all IGF commissions – Three Ships (1998) and Night Passage (2012) performed by Shannon-Latoyah Simon, and Canciones (2008) played by Tom Kerstens; Two Guitars (2018) played by Housden-Tarlton Duo. The Eden-Stell Guitar Duo performed Laura Snowden’s Damn Everything but the Circus! and The Snow Globe; Mela Guitar Quartet performed her My Clock is Broken!; and the Vida Guitar Quartet, with guest saxophonist Amy Green, performed Laura Snowden’s Light Perpetuum.

IGF’s Mainstream Composer Connections
IGF is proud of the long-term commissioning relationship with the outstanding Belize-born British composer, pianist and singer-songwriter, Errollyn Wallen – from Three Ships (1998) to La Luga (2002) for guitar and string quartet, Two Guitars (2018), Road to Strathy Point (2019) and with more to come. IGF also has long-term commissioning relationships with Charlotte Bray, Anna Meredith, Deirdre Gribbin, Effy and Litha Efthymiou, Alwynne Pritchard, Na’ama Zisser, among others.

The Significance of the Name ‘La Leona’
Finally, it is important to mention the title of this project: La Leona and its special significance for guitarists. ‘La Leona’ – ‘the lioness’ – was the name Antonio de Torres gave to the innovative guitar which he created in 1856. This guitar was new in design and was a game-changer in guitar construction which has been a standard that classical guitar luthiers have used as a reference ever since. That is what the La Leona project is aiming for here: to be a game-changer in classical guitar repertoire and performance by women musicians – creating works and performances that are a reference point for years to come.