Among women composers circa 1600–1750, a handful of names are well known today: among these are Francesca Caccini (1587–after 1641), Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665–1729), all of whom composed a large quantity of music, published substantial books of their compositions, and were recognized by authoritative (most often male) musicians, critics, and listeners. Their music appears in concert programmes and recordings, and they may be understood to form part of a canon of women composers from the Baroque era. Recognition of these prominent women (if not yet widespread familiarity with their work) is surely a triumph of feminist musicology and performance in the past forty years.

Yet the attention paid to these prominent women has yielded a misunderstanding of women’s compositional practice during the period – namely that only a handful of women engaged in composition.

This chapter offers a thorough overview of choral composition from its historical foundations in the church to modern trends in choral music today. It outlines technical issues around text setting, writing for specific voice types, notation, and tips for writing for amateur or less experienced groups.

‘I don’t think you intend to be discouraging in your book. I think you have merely overlooked those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population.’1

The words of Reta, in Carol Shields’s Unless, are applicable to the analysis of women composers’ works. Among areas forming a musical canon, the sub-discipline of musical analysis has only recently displayed awareness of the attention to women composers and their music that has taken root in the practice and productions of musicology over the past few decades. Yet at the time from the 1980s onwards when literature on women composers began to present a significant challenge to the pedagogical canon, a new wave of interest in analysis was sparking the publication of textbooks and journals that could have offered an opportunity to include women’s works as valid subjects for analytical interpretation.2

This chapter presents an understanding of compositional practice based fundamentally on sound and space, and looks at a range of case studies that explore the harmonic, timbral, and material consequences of this approach. The chapter concludes by arguing that the variety of approaches discussed succeed because the concern with sound permeates every stage of compositional thinking and does not just manifest in specific compositional techniques.

This section thinks about the relationship between compositional creativity, labour, and money. It outlines how artistic freedom and agency have often been inversely related to stable income, and suggests some ways that composers today might navigate these elements in order to monetise their work.

What is a composer, and what do they do? This introduction explores the idea of composition – in both Western traditions and further afield. It begins by tracing a brief cultural history of the composer in the classical music tradition and their shifting role in society, before considering a range of narratives and definitions of composition, challenging us to think about what the word ‘composition’ might mean for us in the twenty-first century.

The extraordinary growth of scholarship on women composers in recent decades inspires not only female inclusion in traditionally all-male historical narratives but also reappraisal of the period styles that structure those narratives. Does the music of women composers follow patterns of change enshrined in such heirloom categories of music history as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic? What is the critical potential of women’s work as composers for rewriting music-historical surveys? With the music of around 400 female composers of the eighteenth century now known to survive, the field is established for the appraisal of women composers’ relationship to the Classical period, and the ‘Viennese Classical Style’ associated with it.1

The formerly dependable terms invoked thus far – period, Classical, Viennese, and style – deserve rethinking.

This chapter considers techniques of musical development through the lens of solo monodic (i.e. single line) musical works. It explores a range of approaches to melody, development, vertical-horizontal relationships, and expression, suggesting ways to unfold and expand musical ideas that are rooted in sonority and dramaturgy.

This chapter explores a range of approaches, motivations, and sounding results of working with electronics, and in doing so offers tools and methods to decolonise existing, institution-centred histories of music in this genre. The chapter concludes with three specific examples of contemporary musicians at the cutting-edge of work in this area.

Born in the year of the liberation Korea from Japanese colonisation, Younghi Pagh-Paan (*1945) grew up during the Korean war and the subsequent division of her homeland. Although she trained in Seoul, her career as a composer properly started with her move to Freiburg in Germany in 1974. The result was a culture shock, and, throughout much of her career, Pagh-Paan struggled with her displacement and endeavoured to reconcile her gender and cultural identity as an Asian woman with Western modernism; vowing, in her own words, ‘[n]ot [to] write music that distances me from what […] I perceive inside me as the root of our culture’. This chapter discusses Pagh-Paan’s career and her aesthetic beliefs, such as her commitment to the student movement and democratic opposition in her country and her syncretistic religiosity that embraces the different spiritual traditions of her country, such as Shamanism and Taoism, as well as her fervent Catholicism. Analysing the reflection of these ideas in her music I conclude that, transcending notions of cultural contrast or ‘East-meets-West fusion’, Pagh-Paan’s work is a response to more than a century of intimate entanglements between Western and Korean culture.

This brief introduction outlines some of the things that composers might do when they compose, examining how the way composers and think and work is tangled together with the conditions and procedures surrounding the, and how they work.

Women’s voices from the Common Era sixteenth century embodying their musical creativity, especially those from the continent of Europe, emerge most clearly from the written records of the courts and convents of the time. Clarity is, of course, relative: not only are named female composers many fewer than male composers, but also the music they created has not survived in the same quantities as that of their male counterparts. Since notated, attributed music is at the foundation of the critical frame for the appreciation of European music, and the means whereby European musicology has been able to know of and understand the musicians of the past, the imbalance in documentation has led to a truism: that women’s lack of access to education or the public sphere explains why there were comparatively few sixteenth-century female composers.

This chapter explores ways of thinking about ecology through the medium of composition, and how composing relates to the environments around us. It offers a methodological framework for composition that puts listening at the heart of a composer’s engagement with musical material and meaning making. Alongside the author’s examples there are a number of exercises and provocations to help developing one’s own approaches to composition.