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‘Are you lost? This is a composition class, miss.’<\/strong><\/p> The year was 1928. Gra\u017cyna Bacewicz<\/a><\/strong> was 18 years old and no stranger to rigorous musical training. But, at the first meeting of a composition seminar at Warsaw Conservatory, her fellow students, all male, greeted her with the words above. How did she react? <\/p> ‘The jokes and snide remarks about me didn\u2019t last long, three weeks at most,’ she wrote later. ‘Instinctively \u2014 because this wasn\u2019t deliberate \u2014 I adopted an attitude which must have restrained them. I simply paid no attention to their cutting remarks. Thus I took the wind out of their sails. We became great friends.’<\/p> Gra\u017cyna was soon to prove the most gifted of her cohort and became a hugely significant cultural figure in mid-20th century Poland. She was a talented violinist and concertmistress of the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in the years before WWII. However, her fiercest drive was for creation, not performance. <\/p> Bacewicz\u2019s music \u2014 marked by a discipline honed under Nadia Boulanger<\/a><\/strong>, with whom she studied in 1930s Paris \u2014 has its own distinctive character: harmonically neoclassical, rhythmically fresh and propulsive. She was prolific, universally respected, and as decorated in her lifetime, it seems, as any European female composer before Kaija Saariaho<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>‘This fascinating figure remains somewhat in the shadows’<\/h3>