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.

Writers and scholars define the period of first-wave feminism in the Western world in various ways. For some the first ‘wave’ grew out of the demands for equality from women during the French Revolution, for others it had its roots in the Women’s Rights Convention in New York, United States, in 1848. However, it is generally agreed that the period 1880–1920 saw the height of feminist activity from a wide variety of women in Britain, Europe, and the United States.1

Women organized together to demand rights to employment and education, and most agreed that the right to suffrage, being able to vote and take part in political power, was fundamentally important. By 1920, certain women in Canada, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the United States, had been granted the right to vote. But full suffrage was not granted to women in the UK until 1928, in France not until 1944, and Italy not until 1945, for example.2

This chapter explores the importance of adapting for a composer, whether that be in their own creative practice (for example by adapting stories for the stage or screen) or in their engagement with others’ works through arrangements or orchestrations. It considers what a suitable definition of adaptation might be, and where the boundaries of originality might lie in adapting someone else’s work, before arguing that adaption necessitates a valuable set of composition skills that require us to think actively and conscientiously about our role in history and society.

This chapter considers the relationship between composing and nationality, examining what happens when musical influence and practice are reimagined across traditions and cultures. It looks at several case studies to unpick geographical, social, political, and racial musical associations, and reflects critically on composing outside the colonial dominance of Western-centric musical practices.

Musical composition in the Middle Ages involved many processes far removed from what is understood to constitute the subject in the twenty-first century. Whether one considers men or women in the medieval period, it makes the greatest sense to speak about musical production across a broad spectrum of activities including: singing within communities; teaching and learning music (most often through singing); copying and/or commissioning musical, theoretical, and liturgical texts; setting preexisting pieces with new texts (the most common compositional process in Western Europe); recombining older musical materials in new ways; adapting new music or texts (or both) to preexisting circumstances; and lastly introducing completely new pieces or bits of pieces, usually within the context of preexisting materials.1 Scholars have known for decades that women had agency in all these categories; each of them required musical knowledge and creativity.2

This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

In her 1880 memoir, the American pianist Amy Fay described the sheer virtuosity and professional ambition of the numerous young women pianists she encountered.

Existing research on the ISCM tends to focus on the ‘centres’ in Western and Central Europe and North America. Although the membership included countries in Latin America and Asia from early on – for instance, Argentina joined in 1924, and Japan in 1935 – and eventually in Africa (South Africa, 1948), much less attention has been paid to the role the ISCM played in these regions. As this chapter argues, it is in the ‘peripheries’ that the ISCM proved particularly influential in stimulating diverse conceptions of musical modernism within specific local contexts. However, the significance of the ISCM for its far-flung members was rarely reciprocated. The ISCM’s inflexible structure and flawed conception of internationalism, founded on the unquestioned sovereignty of the nation state, perpetuated the imbalances between centre and periphery. Using quantitative data on national and regional representation at various levels, complemented by qualitative data, such as interviews with key players and archival records, I formulate a critique of the ISCM as an institution that struggled to overcome the systemic Eurocentrism of its foundation.

The Nigerian-born composer Akin Euba (1935–2020) saw it as his life’s mission to create an ‘African art music’: ‘a form of music [that is] universal to all Africa’. As the chapter will outline, his career took him from Lagos to Bayreuth (Germany) and, eventually, Pittsburgh (USA), in the course of which he came up with the notions of ‘African pianism’, ‘creative ethnomusicology’ and, finally, ‘intercultural composition’, of which he was an acknowledged pioneer. Rather than seeing intercultural composition as a contradiction of African art music, I argue that Euba’s music embodies the concept of cosmopolitanism as a series of concentric circles as proposed by the Stoics, whereby the local (Yoruba) is contained in a wider (pan-African) sphere, which is in turn encapsulated in the universal. Compositionally, this vision is realised through the combination of elements from Yoruba music, such as timelines, other African influences from the likes of xylophone and mbira music and Western modernism, exemplified by serialism. As my analyses show, these elements are integrated to such an extent as to become inextricable.

This chapter discusses the elusive meaning of ‘inspiration’, and considers what it might feel like, the situations where it might occur, and how to harness and understand it when it does. It finally explores the idea of ‘happy accidents’ and thinks about the relationship between habit and practice as active methods of inspiration in contrast to the more passive Romantic notion of divine intervention.

In her lecture ‘The public voice of women’, Mary Beard begins with Homer’s Odyssey and the ‘first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up”’. Penelope, patient wife of adventuring Odysseus, requests that a bard sing happier tunes; her son, Telemachus, is not impressed. ‘“Mother”, he says, “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household”’.1 With this moment, Beard highlights continuity between antiquity and the present, revealing the importance of female silencing to male identity. Telemachus, she observes, becomes a man by confining Penelope, setting her out of sight and hearing. Her silence amplifies his voice.