Underrepresented Composers: Women Composers

Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel have brought together an international corps of experts to produce The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. This definitive source provides detailed biographies of more than 1,000 composers of Western classical music. In dedicated articles, the Dictionary chronicles the lives and works of a wide array of women. Here you can read about the Medieval mystic Hildgard von Bingen, the Renaissance madrigalist Maddalena Casulana, the flamboyant seventeenth-century vocal composer Barbara Strozzi, the prolific New Englander Amy Beach, and the Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among many other remarkable women.

The International Encyclopedia of Women Composers is a 1981 reference book by Aaron I. Cohen which contains biographies of over 5,000 women composers from nearly 70 countries.

This two volume, A-to-Z encyclopedia represents the first major effort to describe the role of women in all forms of music in the United States since 1900. Entries cover such material as biographical overviews, gender issues, education, and so on. Each entry concludes with a short list of further readings. Photos accompany nearly 100 entries. A preface, an introductory historical overview, a chronology, a guide to related topics, a list of contributors, a general bibliography, and an index help to present the full spectrum of American women who changed the face of music in the 1900s.

Highlights the contributions of women to a variety of musical fields in the 20th cenury. The subjects are: Grazyna Bacewicz, Betty Beath, Anne Boyd, Sylvia Caduff, Ann Carr-Boyd, Gloria Coates, Selma Epstein, Nicola LeFanu, Priscilla McLean, Elizabeth Maconchy, Mary Mageau, Ursula Manlok, Priaulx Rainer, Shulamit Ran, Ruth Schonthal, Margaret Sutherland, Joan Tower, and Gillian Whitehead.

Contains 18 pieces for piano by the following 13 women composers:
Marianna von Auenbrugger, Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, Amy Marcy Beach, Teresa Carreño, Cécile Chaminade, Louise Farrenc, Elisabetta de Gambarini, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Wanda Landowska, Marianne Martinez, Clara Wieck Schumann, Adaline Shepherd, and Maria Szymanowska.

Contains 24 Italian art songs by the following women composers: Orsini, Casulana, Caccini, F., Caccini, S., Sessa, Aleotti, Campana, Strozzi, Badalla, Colbran, Reichardt, Szymanowska, Malibran, and Viardot-Garcia.

Terri Lyne Carrington, Founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, has curated a wide range of jazz compositions written by women composers, from obscure to popular, historic to current, blues to bebop, and beyond in this important collection. It features 101 compositions from a remarkable range of acknowledged titans, young visionaries and unsung heroes in jazz: Mary Lou Williams, Alice Coltrane, esperanza spalding, Geri Allen, Maria Schneider, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Dorothy Ashby, Nubya Garcia, Nicole Mitchell and many others. New Standards also celebrates the global world of jazz, with contributions from a number of international composers.

A collection of piano works written by Black women, including Estelle D. Ricketts, Anna Gardner Goodwin, Viola Kinney, Florence Price, Mary Lou Williams, Julia Perry, Undine Smith Moore, Betty Jackson King, Philippa Schuyler, Tania León, Margaret Bonds, Lena Johnson McLin, Valerie Capers, Regina A. Harris Baiocchi, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Joyce Solomon, Mable Bailey, and Zenobia Powell Perry.

With forty-five songs by twenty-two composers, this is the most comprehensive single volume of art songs composed by women ever published. It includes biographical information about the composers and historical information about each song, with songs in English, French, German and Italian.

25 powerhouse hits from today's greatest divas, including Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Pink, Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Beyonce and more. Songs include Bad Romance, Come Away with Me, Jar of Hearts, Love Song, Mean, My Life Would Suck Without You, Raise Your Glass, Rolling in the Deep, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), Teenage Dream, and You Belong with Me.

From the Mendelssohn archive in Berlin come these sixteen never-before-published Romantic lieder by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. These inspired compositions feature the balanced legato of the classical composers and the sensitive feeling and colorful harmonies of the dawning Romantic era. The volume includes historical background, idiomatic and word-by-word translation of foreign texts, and transcriptions into the International Phonetic Alphabet.

This suite by Libby Larsen originally composed for trumpet and percussion has been arranged for trumpet and piano. Contains 1 score and 1 part with notes by the composer and a biographical sketch on the author. This piece was commissioned by the International Women's Brass Conference at Western Michigan University in 2012.

This piece by Alexina Louie is written for a piano, clarinet, and cello trio. Contains one score and 2 parts, a note by the composer, and biographical notes.

In this volume, Michael K. Slayton has collected essays that focus on women who have made significant contributions to American music. Elizabeth Austin, Susan Botti, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jennifer Higdon, Libby Larsen, Tania León, Cindy McTee, Marga Richter, and Judith Shatin are among the women profiled in this collection. Essays reveal how their works reflect the shifting societal landscapes in the United States over the last seven decades, as well as different stylistic approaches to writing music. Each chapter includes a biography of the composer, an interview, and a detailed analysis of one major composition. The composers openly reflect on their individual journeys, in which they have forged distinct musical languages and found success during different times in history. Women of Influence in Contemporary Music offers a rare glimpse into the styles and attitudes of gifted women and their work.

Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and contemporary American musical life, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active.

This book traces the development of music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through the lens of the work of six women composers: Sofia Gubaidulina, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Libby Larsen, Chen Yi, and Judith Weir. The study integrates cultural contexts with the composers' biographies, their diverse compositional styles, and provides in-depth analyses of their musical works. The analytical approach adopted in this book is supplemented with illustrations of musical examples in order to provide a more complete understanding of the work of these composers.

In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition. The book focuses on nine American women composers whose works were inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates "nature composing" among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.