The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organized thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book’s prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the category of ‘woman composer’ itself. The chapters that follow reveal scenes of flourishing creativity, technical innovation, and (often fleeting) recognition, challenging long-held notions around invisibility and neglect and dismissing clichés about women composers and their work. Leading scholars trace shifting ideas about composers and compositional processes, contributing to a wider understanding of how composers have functioned in history and making this volume essential reading for all students of musical history. In an epilogue, three contemporary composers reflect on their careers and identities.
Matthew Head is Professor of Music at King’s College London. His books include Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000) and Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Music (2013). He is currently writing a life and works of the English composer and singer Harriet Stewart (née Wainewright).
Susan Wollenberg is Professor of Music (emerita) and Emeritus Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her recent publications include chapters in The Songs of Fanny Hensel (2021), Clara Schumann Studies (2021), and the Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music (2022). She co-edited, with Aisling Kenny, Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied (2015), and, with Mariateresa Storino, Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800–1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoire (2023).
