Pioneer Sketches (2025)
(Five Portraits of Women in Science)

I was delighted that the Alina Orchestra played my 2014 work Quark Dances in their 2025 "I Am Woman" concert. Little did I imagine, however, that it would result in a brand new commission for 2026. I am hugely grateful to Rosalind Riley for sponsoring Pioneer Sketches: Five Portraits of Women in Science — it has been a joy to respond to Rosalind’s idea for a new chamber orchestral piece celebrating the lives of five extraordinary women from recent history.

This twelve-minute work runs continuously, but has five distinct movements:

i) Hedy Lamarr – This 1940s Hollywood actress co-patented frequency-hopping technology during WWII, designed to prevent enemy jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes. Listen for short musical messages that are first continually disrupted, then transmitted in full, thanks to Hedy’s groundbreaking invention.

ii) Rosalind Franklin – The English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to understanding the molecular structure of DNA is commemorated in a slow movement where chords gradually thin out to reveal their inner ‘molecular’ structures.

iii) Mary Anning – Angular melodies in the strings depict this hardy, tireless fossil hunter and pioneering palaeontologist, out on the beach in all weathers searching for discoveries along the shores of Lyme Regis. iv) Katsuko Saruhashi – Listen for the raindrops on windowpanes that so fascinated Katsuko — the Japanese geochemist whose research on radioactive fallout contributed significantly to international efforts to restrict above-ground nuclear testing — as a child.

v) Katherine Johnson – The mathematician whose trajectory calculations were critical to the success of NASA’s early space missions, including Apollo 11, is celebrated in a quasi-waltz that feels as if it is in two time-signatures at once. Short musical cells from the opening, this time representing Katherine’s myriad calculations, return to bring the work to its conclusion.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad, 2026