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Page 1 of 3

  • Prologue

  • Edited by Matthew Head, King's College London, Susan Wollenberg, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
    Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    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.

  • 2 - In Search of a Feminist Analysis

  • from Part I - Themes in Studying Women Composers
  • Edited by Matthew Head, King's College London, Susan Wollenberg, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
    Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024, pp 36-49

  • Summary

    ‘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

  • 9 - Did Women Have a Classical Style?

  • from Part III - Women Composers circa 1750–1880
  • Edited by Matthew Head, King's College London, Susan Wollenberg, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
    Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024, pp 161-182

  • Summary

    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.

The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers
  • Edited by Matthew Head, Susan Wollenberg
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised 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.

Music in Twentieth-Century Oxford

Page 1 of 3