1 Uncovering historical women composers
Once you have committed to diversifying your repertoire by programming more music by women, you will need to decide which to include. As you learned in Week 2, there are different approaches which you could take to building more diverse programmes. You could go all out and organise a whole concert of works by women composers, or you could add works by women into a themed programme.
If you are planning to add works by women into a themed programme, you will find The Big List of Women Composers, which has been compiled by Donne Women in Music, an invaluable resource. You can search this by musical period, genre, or country; so, you will be able to find multiple suggestions for women composers to add to your programme, whatever the theme. The Big List of Women Composers contains entries for more than 5,000 women composers. Entries provide basic biographical information and links to further resources.
The Composers section of the Women By Music website also brings together information on a wide range of historical women composers, including biographical information and lists of suggested reading should you wish to find out more about them. Additionally, the Boulanger Initiative also offers an extremely valuable open-access database of works by women and gender-marginalised composers.
Doing further research
When you have chosen which women composers to include and discovered some basic biographical information about their lives and careers, you may find yourself feeling curious about them and the musical cultures and contexts within which they worked, and eager to find out more. The academic study of women composers – which is often called Feminist Musicology or Women in Music Studies – has grown to be a relatively well-established field since music scholars and performers started to explore composers who have been excluded from the conventional music canon in the later twentieth century.
Below is a list of suggestions of accessible books about women composers which you might like to have a look at. If you have access to a local library or to one within a university or conservatoire, these titles should be available or (if they are not) you could ask the librarian or library team to arrange an inter-library loan for you:
- Judith Bowers and Jane Tick (eds) (1986) Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- James R. Briscoe (ed.) (2004) New Historical Anthology of Music by Women. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
- Julie C. Dunbar (2011) Women, Music, Culture: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge.
- Sophie Fuller (1994) The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629–Present. London: Pandora Books.
- Laura Hamer (ed.) (2021) The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Karin Pendle (ed.) (1991) Women & Music: A History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
- Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuels (eds) (1994) The Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. London: Macmillan.
To find out more about your chosen women composers, you could also consider reaching out to a music researcher working on them. As you learned in Week 2, many music researchers maintain active online profiles and you will be able to find them through doing an internet search. As suggested in Week 2, if you reach out to a music researcher for advice, you might want to consider inviting them to write programme notes, present a pre-concert talk, or even involve them in some outreach work to help build your audience for the new work which you have chosen to programme.