Towards the Summers Night: A Mentoring Project for Australian composers Identifying as Women Cat Hope, Nat Grant, Gabriella Smart and Tristen Parr Abstract The Summers Night Project is a composer mentoring program established in 2018 by musicians Cat Hope and Gabriella Smart, with the support of Perth based new music organization Tura New Music. The project aims to support and mentor emerging Australian composers who identifying as women to create new compositions for performance, with the aim of growing the gender diversity of composers in music programs Australia-wide. Three new works were workshopped, recorded then performed on a short tour of Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia in July 2018. Three composers were chosen from a national call- out and works were performed by an ensemble consisting of members from the Decibel and Soundstream new music ensembles. The project takes its name and inspiration from Australian feminist Anne Summers, author of the ground-breaking examination of women in Australia’s history ‘Damned Whores and God’s Police’ (1975), and was inspired by her 2017 ‘Women’s Manifesto’. 1 This chapter will examine the rationale for the need of a project of this kind, the processes and results of the project itself, and plans for its future. How the project came about The Summers Night Project was established to support and mentor composers at any stage of their career who identify as women to create a composition for performances in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, with the aim of growing the gender diversity of composers in music programs Australia-wide. The project was initiated from a conversation between project founders Cat Hope and Gabriella Smart when they were working together on the 2016 Soundstream Emerging Composers Forum 2 in Adelaide. Smart noted the difficulty in attracting women to the long running program, where Hope was a mentor that year. Both realised that just being women visible in the industry was not enough to attract others to it, and decided they would pool resources to create a mentorship program for women identifying composers. Hope took this idea to new music organisation Tura, who were looking for projects to encourage more women in their programs, and they offered to produce and host the program. This provided valuable administrative, production and funding support enabling the project to go ahead, especially for the touring aspect of the project. As Hope was in Melbourne, Smart in Adelaide, and Tura in Perth, it was decided these would be the three centres for the project. In addition to Tura’s support, Hope and Smart garnered financial support from their organisations, and set about finding other supporters which included APRA AMCOS, who had recently released their commissioned study entitled “Australian Women Screen Composers: Career Barriers and Pathways” , 3 leading to the organisation committing to invest funds in mentorship programs for women composers. Interestingly, the organisation insisted that both men and women act in mentor roles as a condition of their funding. The 1 Anne Summers, Women’s Manifesto http://legacy.annesummers.com.au/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/Womens-Manifesto.pdf Accessed 10 September 2019 2 Resonate Magazine, Soundstream Emerging Composers Forum - five composers, five different experiences https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/soundstream-emerging-composers-forum-five-composers-five- different-experiences Accessed 10 September 2019 3 Catherine Strong and Fabian Cannizzo, Australian Women Screen Composers: Career Barriers and Pathways, (Melbourne: RMIT, 2017).