2 Finding scores of works by historical women composers
Although, as you learned in Week 1, finding scores of women composers’ music can still prove challenging – because much less of it has been published compared to the work of men – a growing amount is easily (and often also freely) available online.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), which is also known as the Petrucci Library, is an extremely valuable resource for finding music scores online. It brings together a huge collection of music scores which are within the public domain. It is searchable by instrument, composer, nationality, and musical period, and includes a very large amount of women’s music (alongside that of other composers). You could even consider becoming a contributor to the collection yourself.
Specifically bringing together scores and music by women composers for free online, Music By Women also offers a large dedicated collection of works and music examples written by women. You will also find this extremely useful within a teaching context if you are involved in music education. The Women Composers Collection database from the Hathi Trust is another useful online resource.
The Piano Music She Wrote project, curated by pianists Sandra Mogensen and Erica Sipes, brings together a large collection of piano scores by women composers.
Activity _unit3.3.1 Activity 1
Although a lot of women’s music is now available online, quite a lot of it is still in handwritten manuscript form. Consider the following questions and write your answers in the text box below.
- Why might it be difficult to perform from a digitised copy of a handwritten manuscript score?
- How might you make such a piece easier to perform?
Discussion
- The composer’s handwriting could be difficult to decipher; depending on the historical period from which the piece dates, the score could include old-fashioned musical conventions (e.g. unusual clefs or symbols) which are no longer in common use; and the quality of digitised materials (depending on the source material) might be low quality and difficult to read from.
- You can make it easier to perform this music by making your own, up-to-date copy of the work, using modern clefs and musical notation, and using a music notation software package to set it. By doing this, you would effectively be creating your own new performance edition of the work.