Our knowledge and understanding of Western classical music – its history, culture, criticism, and analysis, and our encounters with music directly as performers and listeners – rest on a number of fundamental resources: dictionaries and encyclopaedias, histories of music, analytical and critical studies, and repertoire in editions as well as cultivated in performance, whether live or recorded. This rich, interlocking array of resources has traditionally and systematically either sidelined or ignored totally the contribution of women as composers to the musical culture it represents. This volume builds on the remarkable transformation in musical scholarship since the 1970s that has, on the one hand, sought to create for women the kinds of resources formerly assembled exclusively for male composers, and, on the other hand, applied feminist thinking to the institutions, discourses, values, and silences that have characterized music history itself.

In beginning here with a brief history of writing about women composers, we seek to avoid the amnesia highlighted by Paula Higgins in Chapter 1, whereby each generation feels they are rediscovering women composers for the first time. If, today, there is a danger that writing about women composers may disappear from curricula and bibliographies as scholarly enthusiasms change, and older canons – even feminist ones – are replaced, one solution is to preserve a sense of the history of discourse on women composers as an intrinsic part of the subject (see further, Chapter 3, ‘Composing Women’s History’).

Writing about Women Composers: A Historical Outline

For historical perspective we are aided by the broadly based anthology of source readings, Women in Music, compiled by Carol Neuls-Bates.¹ It appears that the topic has through the ages been bound up with issues of female equality, emancipation, and power.

In the early modern era (approximately 1450–1750), an anti-misogynist discourse concerning the perfectibility of women, the excellence of their character, and their exemplary deeds, emerged in aristocratic Catholic circles as part of a debate later styled the ‘querelle des femmes’ (the ‘woman question’), and now taken to represent a feminist project.² In this context appeared references to Sappho by Giovanni Boccaccio in De mulieribus Claris (Concerning Famous Women) (1361–2), and Christine de Pisan in Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies),  published in 1405. Judith Tick notes that ‘in a French translation of Boccaccio [as Des cleres et nobles femmes], c. 1470, Sappho is depicted with a harp, psaltery and organ, providing a rare illustration of a historical female musician’.³ The ‘querelle des femmes’ is also a context for Maddalena Casulana’s dedication of her Primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (1568) to Isabella de’ Medici Orsina (quoted in Chapter 1), with its declaration of her explicit intention to show the world that women, too, compose. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the discourse of exemplary womanhood was redeployed under absolute sovereignty. In Titon du Tillet’s account of the flourishing of arts and sciences under Louis XIV, published as Le Parnasse François (1732), only two musicians are afforded a place on the heights of Parnassus – Jean-Baptiste Lully and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. (The latter’s inclusion is highlighted by Rebecca Cypess in Chapter 8, countering the commonly held view of the limited extent of women composers’ presence in the musical culture of the past.) In her opera seria Talestri regina delle amazzoni (c. 1763), Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Dowager Electress of Saxony, celebrated female sovereignty in a plot where the titular heroine brings about an era of peace by reconciling the warring Amazons and Scythians (see Chapter 10). Charles Burney made the message explicit: the composing female ruler is a sign of progress from barbarism to civility.⁴

The notion that women composers constituted a special class because of their sex first became widespread in German-speaking lands in the early nineteenth century, in the context of a ‘science’ of sexual difference, a bourgeois ideal of female domesticity, and the growth of modern institutions of commercial musical culture. The category ‘woman composer’, as it appeared in such widely circulated journals as the Berlin Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, admitted the existence of female composers while seeking drastic limits on their artistic and historical significance.⁵ The locution ‘lady composer’ appeared in English as early as 1830, bearing connotations of social privilege and amateurism; and as late as 1970, Pauline Oliveros, in ‘And don’t call them “lady” composers’, wrote: ‘This expression is anathema to many self‐respecting women composers. It effectively separates women’s efforts from the mainstream … What critic today speaks of a “gentleman composer?”’.⁶

In the course of the nineteenth century, the category ‘woman composer’, while retaining a patronizing charge, hosted debates over women’s achievements and potential in music. If, as Amanda Harris observes, the music profession was not central to the activism of first-wave feminism, nonetheless the emergence of international movements for legal reform and female suffrage reverberated in discussions of women as composers.⁷ Already in the ‘history’ of women composers published by the composer and critic Maurice Bourges in 1847, the author linked his project of writing affirmatively about women’s history as composers to the broader context of female emancipation.⁸ He reviewed and rejected misogynist prejudice, highlighted inequality of education and professional opportunity, and looked forward to a future ‘musical republic of women’.

Towards the end of the century, at the height of first-wave feminism, national and even imperial celebration of the compositional achievements of European women reached greater prominence. The Chicago World Fair of 1893, commemorating 400 years since Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, incorporated a ‘Women’s Building’, a week-long feminist congress, and orchestral music by Ingeborg von Bronsart, Rosalind Frances Ellicott, and Amy Beach. Published evaluations of women’s achievements in the arts, sciences, and history were also included.⁹ Among them was a biographical account of German women composers by the freelance musicologist and music teacher Anna Morsch .¹⁰ Reaching back to Clara Schumann – ‘our old mistress’ (‘unsrer Altmeisterin’) – Morsch employed strategies of validation, praising Schumann for her devotion to her husband, Ottilie Heinke for her children’s songs, and Ingeborg von Bronsart for her ambitious genre choices and inexhaustible invention. Hierarchies of genre, and notions of female compositional weakness, break down when, speaking of Heinke’s songs for children, she praises the composer’s ‘inner creative power, the drive to express in artistic form that which lives and weaves within her’. Morsch spoke approvingly of pioneering and boundary-breaking women engaged in the then current project of emancipation. If Morsch had no immediate influence on writing about women composers, she was not forgotten later. Eva Rieger recalled her awareness of Morsch’s writing as she prepared her own pioneering study Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft (Woman, Music, and Patriarchy, 1981).¹¹

Around the turn of the twentieth century, public-facing books and articles concerning the ‘woman composer question’ appeared in French, German, and English, reflecting, as Neuls-Bates suggests, the tensions surrounding women’s newfound prominence in public art music.¹² Both those ‘for’ and those ‘against’ conceded that there had never been a ‘great’ woman composer, the debate turning on whether this was due to women’s nature or nurture. George Upton’s notorious Women in Music (1880) offered the classic statement of innate female incapacity in the face of the ‘science’ of composition – a view reiterated by Carl Seashore as late as 1940. On the ‘nurture’ side, Ethyl Smyth’s Female Pipings in Eden (1933) – inspired in part by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) – highlighted women’s restricted access to the educational and professional opportunities that Smyth deemed essential for ‘greatness’. (Upton, Seashore, and Smyth are all included in Neuls-Bates’s anthology.¹³) This type of argument was developed systematically in the second-wave context of Marcia Citron’s article published in 1990, ‘Gender, Professionalism, and the Musical Canon’, where, crucially, it was expanded with a critique of masculine bias in the notion of ‘greatness’.¹⁴ Here again, as noted earlier in this section, apropos Morsch and Rieger, we may find connections between writings on women composers representative of both first and second-wave feminist approaches. However, the ‘woman composer question’ around 1900 was not a historically minded recovery project but rather addressed the potential of contemporary and future women to succeed in operas and orchestral music, then deemed the ‘highest’ forms of composition.

As in earlier historical moments, attitudes to female composers were shaped by notions beyond those of sex. In Woman’s Work in Music (1903), Arthur Elson’s openness to the possibility of current and future female greatness was tied to a patriotic ‘New World’ conviction that sexual inequality was a historical European problem. In the United States, Elson implied, women’s genius would unfold unfettered by oppressive sexual politics.¹⁵

Despite, or perhaps because of, this public debate, the male authors of musicological publications closed ranks, systematically excluding women as composers from their still emerging discipline. As Judith Tick observes:

This pattern of sidelining and exclusion proved foundational for the identity of both the discipline of musicology and narrative constructions of ‘music history’ for much of the next century. Betty Atterbury, observing that ‘omission is a powerful teacher’, laments that generations of students gained the impression that women simply do not matter when it comes to composition.¹⁷ Vicki D. Baker, citing Atterbury, identifies a ‘cycle of ignorance’, noting that Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization (1941) contained not one female composer, while the first three editions of Grout–Palisca’s History of Western Music (1960, 1973, 1980) contained one.¹⁸ This situation continued until at least the 1970s, when female musicologists from the United States (and some of their transatlantic equivalents), inspired by second-wave feminism, advocated for a steady increase in the number of women composers included in college survey texts.¹⁹

Between the partial achievement of suffrage (around 1920) and second-wave feminism (the late 1960s) there emerged a new kind of music-historical writing under the heading of ‘women and music’, concerned more with the social and spiritual import of women’s music making than with individual composers.²⁰ Among them was Sophie Drinker’s Music and Women (1948), the subject of a subtle appraisal by Ruth Solie. Drinker tacitly ceded the ground of composition to men, turning her attention to amateur music making; true to her time, she understood the latter as a moralizing, civilizing force. Solie relates:

Since the 1970s

The history of recent feminist musicology, as told by Ruth Solie in another context, involves two phases, initially sequential, thereafter proceeding in parallel: first, in the 1970s, a research-centred phase, aimed at the recovery of lost composers and pieces.²² This was part of the broader project of ‘women’s history’, a term which, in Solie’s use in 2001, conveyed ‘positivist’ scholarship, and a biographical focus. In the late 1980s, Solie reports, musicology began to incorporate feminist theory developed in other academic disciplines, launching critiques of its own historiography and critical frameworks. This she styled ‘[musicological] feminism proper’.

Solie published her 2001 Grove article in the wake of sweeping disciplinary change.²³ The iconoclastic spirit of the 1990s was manifested in Anglophone critiques of documentary ‘positivism’ (notably by Joseph Kerman),²⁴ of historical narratives based on style periods, of structural analysis, and of a narrow concept of music as non-representational and disembodied. The joy of rediscovering women composers was tempered by an awareness that interpreting them as exceptional individuals – indeed, as manifestations of exceptional individualism – reinscribed a composer- and work-based approach to music history, and an aesthetics of genius, that for some scholars was part of the problem. (As Rebecca Cypess shows in Chapter 8, the tendency to focus on the few ‘great names’ among them is now tempered by wider knowledge of women’s compositional activity.) Responses to Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (1991), varying among enthusiastic, cautious, and hostile, were symptomatic of a fractious disciplinary moment involving the defence of traditional musicology, the recovery of women’s history in music, and studies of musical representation (music as ‘gendered discourse’).²⁵ Questions of what a feminist musicology would look like were raised in this context: was women’s history insufficiently critical of the apparatus of traditional musicology to warrant the term feminist; or, by insisting on the category ‘woman’ as a focus of research did it strategically insist on the lived experience of women?

Even as intellectual fissures emerged, pioneering scholars joined in defining an expanding field of ‘gender-sensitive music criticism’ that encompassed a wide range of musicological approaches.²⁶ In landmark books such as Musicology and Difference (1993) and Cecilia Reclaimed (1994) the recovery project rubbed shoulders with critiques of gendered ideology in musical practices and ways of knowing.²⁷

Inevitably, these various developments met with resistance in some quarters. An anonymous writer in the Musical Times in 1994 (the year that the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers appeared) opined that ‘musicologists and concert promoters frantically dredge up women composers from the past’.²⁸ But pockets of resistance to the phenomenon could not stem the emergence of these composers and their works from the shadows, a process that was widely and enthusiastically welcomed in other quarters. It was unprecedentedly refreshing for those involved in the early stages of this process to be able to teach, talk, and write about ‘she’, ‘her’, and ‘her music’ instead of always ‘he’, ‘him’, and ‘his music’ as was previously the case. Also refreshing was the overturning of assumptions (embedded somehow in our consciousness) such as the belief that women composers were unlikely to have contributed to large-scale musical genres, or to the avant-garde trends of their time, or to have attracted patronage, or to hold positions of power.

If, as Higgins suggests in Chapter 1, no sooner did academic studies of women composers rise to prominence in the 1980s than they lost ground amid millennial disciplinary change, there is considerable evidence that performers, concert directors, and media programmers continue to work towards equality and inclusion. In 2021, a series of weekday lunchtime concerts broadcast live on BBC Radio Three in early September began with two Proms: the first of these presented a programme of ‘Chamber Music from Cadogan Hall’, with ‘music by the nineteenth-century composer Pauline Viardot and her friends and contemporaries’ (the latter category including Clara Schumann and Maria Malibran, Viardot’s sister, as well as Brahms and Liszt).²⁹ Three of the programmes that followed, from the Lammermuir Festival, similarly intermingled songs by male and female contemporaries. In the final recital of the series, the soprano Mary Bevan and pianist Joseph Middleton programmed eight pairs of songs, each with one song by a male and one by a female composer, setting texts in French on related topics. The resultant mixture was dubbed by Bevan as ‘Voyage au lumière’ (Journey into the Light), which she saw as reflecting women’s emergence ‘from the shadows’.³⁰ This structure conveyed the sense of a unified song repertoire, its territory shared by the composers, while representing their individual responses to the poetic texts. Their subjects ranged from birdlife, with Amy Beach’s ‘Je demande à l’oiseau’ (I Ask the Bird), alongside Séverac’s ‘Les hiboux’ (The Owls), to the lament topic, in Pauline Viardot’s ‘Chanson du pêcheur (Lamento)’, paired with Duparc’s ‘Romance de Mignon’, amid a variety of others. Such enlightened examples of contemporary programming offer hope for the establishment of a model along the lines of Roxanna Panufnik’s vision of the ideal concert programme, as expressed in her contribution to the epilogue in this volume.

The series of BBC Proms broadcast during two weeks of live performances in August 2020 started with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in a thought-provoking programme that began with the world premiere of Hannah Kendall’s Tuxedo: Vasco “de” Gama, commissioned by the BBC and inspired by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. This was followed by Eric Whitacre’s Sleep, Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3, the ‘Eroica’, the last-named neatly bookending the exploratory work of Kendall with the revolutionary work of Beethoven – the figure whose shadow haunted composers, whether male or female, who followed him. This programming endorsed the change in gender balance reflected in new music commissions for the Proms over recent decades. But also its production during a time of pandemic – in a concert series reflecting a determination to continue offering cultural stimulus amid strenuous circumstances – lent extra significance to the exciting launch of new music presented together with a powerful reminder of the enduring capacity of music of the past to ‘speak’ to us in the present.

With their undoubtedly increased visibility, it could be felt that in the twenty-first century women composers are ‘here to stay’. However, that women’s recognition as composers is even now not universally won is exemplified in the pedagogical sphere by the survey of the 158 pieces on the 2019–20 ABRSM (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) piano syllabus for grades 1–8 conducted by the composer Angela Slater, who found that ‘only 12–8% of the total – are by women’. Analyzing the syllabus for the twenty years from 1999 to 2019, Slater found that only 4.4 per cent of pieces were by women. Pam Westwood, ‘one of the few female composers to feature on the ABRSM piano syllabus’, regarded her attempts to get the lack of women remedied as ‘an uphill struggle’, and recalled the lack of female role models when she began her composing career: ‘they were all male, which is shocking’.³¹

The recent newspaper report concerning the experience of the composer Annabel Bennett gives further evidence of prejudice, chiming with perceptions of female creative status some two centuries earlier. As the twenty-first century reporter noted, Bennett ‘felt she was being held back in the world of male-dominated classical music … but with a change of name it all started to click’. Bennett herself reported: ‘When I sent out my music under my own name as a woman, it got nowhere. But as soon as I sent it out as a man [Arthur Parker] I got noticed’. The report quotes a spokeswoman for the BBC who said that they rejected ‘any suggestion we select music for any reason other than merit’, an assertion that we might consider debatable on more general grounds.³² The history of women composers, like that of writing about them, does not comprise an unbroken progression towards equality.

The under-representation of women’s achievements can be seen in other spheres. In another recent report in the Times, appropriately published on Women’s Day 2021, and headlined, ‘Too many men are honoured on banknotes’, it was observed that ‘while the Queen is ever present on the front’, the number of other women appearing on the reverse was only three (Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Jane Austen). These featured only on £10 notes, with men featuring entirely on the other denominations. Sarah Coles, from the investment company Hargreaves Lansdown, was quoted as saying: ‘It’s not just a problem with how people are selected; it also comes down to society itself, and the way women have been sidelined in history.’ And Felicia Willow, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, added that ‘according to the Bank of England our notes feature those who have “shaped UK society through their thought, leadership or values”’; she asked, ‘so where are all the brilliant women who have done just that?’³³

On its website (consulted in October 2021), the National Gallery puts the question: ‘In a collection of over 2,300 paintings spanning the 13th to early 20th century, why are there so few, 21 to be precise, by women?’ It goes on to note that ‘despite the obstacles they faced; no formal art training for women, exclusion from male life drawing classes, harassment, and prejudice to name but a few, they succeeded because of their determination and talent. Many were among the most famous and sought-after artists of their day’. The reported paucity of women artists’ representation in the National Gallery’s collection raises further questions as to what the gallery’s intention may be to remedy the status quo.³⁴

Overview of the Volume

The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers draws together some of the most exciting recent and emerging work on women composers. Broadly speaking, this work is feminist because it is not content to add women into existing historical plots but challenges those narratives on the basis of female achievements. As Griselda Pollock asked in the introduction to her Vision and Difference (1988): ‘Is adding women to art history the same as producing feminist art history?’ She answered: ‘Demanding that women be considered not only changes what is studied and what becomes relevant to investigate but it challenges the existing disciplines politically’.³⁵ Elaborating on this, she observed:

Part I of the Companion introduces debates pertinent to the volume as a whole. In Chapter 1, Paula Higgins, addressing the formation of repertorial and scholarly canons, identifies overlapping processes of forgetting through which women composers – even when earning recognition from their contemporaries – vanish from the historical record. She implicates musicology in this process, urging continued engagement with documentary research, and with the critical resources of second-wave feminism. Continuing these themes in Chapter 2, Susan Wollenberg – highlighting the importance of musical analysis for canon formation – notes the relative neglect of music by women in this sub-discipline. Urging close reading, but not methodological uniformity, she offers diverse models from recent publications. Turning from canonicity to historiography, Matthew Head in Chapter 3 reflects on the narrative devices and trajectories of histories of women composers, noting a favoured pattern of progress from silencing to autonomy that inadvertently marginalizes women’s compositional work through the centuries. Sophie Fuller, in Chapter 4, and Leah Broad, in Chapter 5, shed light on questions of women’s move towards professionalism as composers, and women composers’ expression of their own ‘voices’, respectively, with reference to a selection of composers including Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, and their contemporaries.

Parts II–IV, rather than offering a survey, or an approach simply through lives and works, involve historical questions about the figure of the composer, and their creative work: what was their status, socially; what did composition involve, technically; and what did it mean, culturally? Margot Fassler (in Chapter 6) eschews modern notions of the composer as an individual, focusing instead on processes of musical production that encompassed the works of poets, scribes, and performers. Laurie Stras (Chapter 7), while acknowledging the rise of individual, named composers in sixteenth-century Europe, highlights the role of arrangement and performance in creating music, prior to the emergence of a regulative work concept. Working cross-culturally, she draws on the practices of sixteenth-century female singers in China and India, urging an expansion in notions of composition to encompass the interplay of notes, poetry, and singing voice. The unintended consequences of thinking about composers as exceptional individuals are highlighted by Rebecca Cypess in Chapter 8. She notes that a near exclusive emphasis today on a few professional female composers of the early modern era creates a false impression that composing was a rare activity. Invoking Christopher Small’s notion of ‘musicking’, she traces the widespread practices of composition among professional female performers, aristocratic, and religious women, and in doing so normalizes composing as a component of public and private musical life. At stake in these chapters is a turn away from the myth of ‘great women composers’ to ‘women who composed’, matched by a geographical expansion beyond Europe to the New World.

Part II, comprising Chapters 9–11 and the ‘common-practice era’ (c. 1750–1880), deepens understanding of women’s contributions as composers to areas of musical history in which their participation can be found documented. In Chapter 9, Head and Wollenberg consider the potential of works by women to contribute to ongoing critique of the category of ‘Viennese classical style’. Expanding coverage beyond Vienna, and questioning the centrality of absolute instrumental music, they emphasize period ideals of emotional restraint and naturalness, implied by the term ‘galant’. In so doing, they link musical styles to social behaviour and identity. In Chapter 10, Anja Bunzel and Stephen Rodgers revisit the quintessentially Romantic genre of Lied. Linking analysis with musicology’s contextual turn, they show how the interwoven spaces of salon and song represented privileged sites for constructions of female subjectivity, voice, and social commentary, drawing on repertoire that constitutes a rich historical archive of female creativity and experience. In Chapter 11, Joe Davies and Alexander Stefaniak appraise the importance of the piano for female performer–composers (or composer–performers). In their reading, the piano mediated between public and private, amateur and professional, learned and popular, songfulness and virtuosity, and improvisation and notation, among other dualities. They explore the fluid boundary between composition and performance, via interpretative performance, improvisation, and notated improvisatory work (including cadenzas, a sub-genre newly explored in scholarship on women’s contribution).

The three chapters (Chapters 12–14) in Part IV, while reflecting their authors’ individual specialisms, all explore women composers against the backdrop of major developments including feminist movements, technological changes in the production of music, and challenges to the authority of ‘the composer’ mounted primarily within electronic music and sound art. In Chapter 12, Sophie Fuller shows the overlap but also mismatch between first-wave feminism and the experiences and values of female composers. The overlap is evident in newly formed organizations that supported women musicians, and in women’s demands for both advanced musical education and professional opportunities in orchestral performance. Amid this collective activism, however, the discourses of great music, and great composers, remained grounded in Romantic mythology of individualism and male genius, and music’s transcendent character. High-minded critics condescended to female composers of commercially successful song precisely because of that success; reviewers of the orchestral music of Augusta Holmès were baffled at what they perceived as musical virility, and Ethel Smyth never reconciled her self-conception as a great composer with the feminist collectivity to which she also subscribed. In Chapter 13, Louise Gray documents how second-wave feminist thought and electronic technology ‘exploded’ power structures and transformed ideas of ‘the composer’. In the music and aesthetics of Pauline Oliveros, Gray discovers critique of images of women in canonical repertory (for example, Bye-Bye Butterfly, 1965), a decentring of the composer in the practice of Deep Listening, and a revisionist (even democratizing) inclusivity about different types of sound. Nonetheless, she also shows how sexism and exclusion continued to flourish in studio culture, in the reception of female composers, and in histories of electronic music. In Chapter 14 (‘Vibrations: Women in Sound Art, 1980–2000’), Gascia Ouzounian highlights how feminist critique has transformed the figure of the composer and toppled boundaries that historically privileged the category of ‘music’ over sound. However, Ouzounian (like Gray) notes an overwhelming male bias in the public presentation of sound art and its history, suggesting that exclusion operates even at the level of classification of artists. Ouzounian’s paradox – ‘the remarkable inventiveness of female sound artists’ and their exclusion from sound-art discourses and canons – sounds an all-too familiar note.

In the epilogue, three professional female composers of international standing, from contrasting backgrounds, and working in different musical idioms, reflect on their composing careers, and the roles of various mentors and exemplars in their early development. Nicola LeFanu, who has been active on behalf of women composers as her own career developed, recalls that, as the daughter of the composer Elizabeth Maconchy, she was unaware in her earlier years that male composers had dominated in history. Roxanna Panufnik describes how she was encouraged to write down her compositional work at an early stage by Oliver Knussen, visiting her parents (her father being the composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik). Shirley J. Thompson, OBE, reveals the crucial encouragement of her compositional efforts during her studies in music at Liverpool University from Professor Robert Orledge.

As part of the invitation to contribute to the epilogue the editors suggested to the authors their paths to becoming a composer, the shaping of their careers, and their artistic identity, intentions, and choices. Surveying the book as a whole, we find such considerations as these among the threads woven into the chapters in Parts I–IV, inflected by their differing historical contexts, while also reflecting the individual experience of women composers through the ages.