Farnham Youth Choir put out a new mini-album recording, Herstory, on Spotify and YouTube on March 1.

It is the culmination of the choirs’ 2022 composer-in-residence programme that saw composer Russell Hepplewhite and librettist Dr Helen Eastman write three new songs, one for each of the choirs.

The three songs each feature inspiring women scientists from history: Mary Anning, palaeontologist; Caroline Herschel, astronomer and comet-finder; and Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, the so-called ‘human computers’ who calculated NASA’s missions to the moon in the 1950s.

The songs are Sea Shores about Anning, Comet Crazy about Herschel and In The Numbers about the NASA mathematicians.

The composer and librettist both came to meet the choirs’ singers and answered some really thought-provoking questions about writing music and words.

The three songs were premiered at Farnham Youth Choir’s summer concert at the Menuhin Hall in June and Comet Crazy featured in Farnham Youth Choir’s inaugural Singing Spree in the same month.

Farnham Youth Choir artistic director Patrick Barrett said: “It has been a joy to work with such talented creatives, Russell and Helen, to celebrate the talents of these powerful women in history/herstory!”