Women composers profoundly shaped music across the ages, their innovative voices breaking down barriers and enriching the classical landscape. Below, we highlight one trailblazer per period, before leading you on a rich journey of discovery.
Trailblazers: Great Women Composers
Musician, botanist, medic, linguist, mystic and so much more, the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was frequently consulted by popes and emperors. She saw music as a direct route to God—“words symbolise the humanity of the Son of God, while music represents his divinity,” she wrote. Hildegard was a prolific composer, and some 100 of her works survive today, consisting mostly of ecstatic, often sensual long-breathed songs set to her own poetry.
Born in Florence in 1587, “La Cecchina” was the highest paid musician at the court of Medici. Her 1618 collection of songs, Il primo libro delle musiche, points at both her ability to shift between styles and to her love of elaborate vocal writing. But her greatest legacy is the 1625 opera La liberazione di Ruggiero, the first known to be written by a woman, and thoroughly modern in both its content and musical approach.
At a time and place when women composers were virtually unknown, Barbara Strozzi rose to the top, composing music of considerable emotional depth and melodic invention. She was born in Venice in 1619 and introduced to fashionable intellectual circles by her father Giulio who sent her to study with the great opera composer Cavalli. Strozzi published an astonishing seven collections of secular vocal music, including more than 100 solo cantatas, arias and madrigals, a volume unmatched by any composer of the day.
Legend has it that during the French Revolution, the noble-born Hélène de Montgeroult saved herself from the guillotine by improvising variations on the Marseillaise before the Revolutionary Tribunal. In 1795, she became the first female piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire and published her first compositions. Through her piano pieces, she not only created a piano “method” used through the following century, but also pioneered the expressive style later made famous by Chopin.
One of the most celebrated pianists of the 19th century who toured all around Europe, Clara Schumann was equally talented as a composer, at 16 premiering her own Piano Concerto. Indeed, her fame exceeded her now famous husband, Robert Schumann, but the toll of bringing up their extensive family and often having to be its chief earner hindered her creativity. Yet she further completed several magnificent works including a Piano Trio, songs and choral works.
Florence Price succeeded spectacularly as a symphonic composer, when her Symphony No. 1 was premiered in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—the first time such a work by a Black woman had ever been performed by a professional American ensemble. Brilliantly blending the European classical tradition with melodies from her African American heritage, Price continued composing in that vein throughout her life, including three more symphonies, a Piano Concerto, songs and chamber music.
Composer, violinist and singer, Caroline Shaw (born 1982) is a transformative voice in contemporary music, whether working with Rosalia or Renée Fleming. In 2013, she became the youngest ever, and first woman in over two decades, to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices. Shaw’s innovative music effortlessly blends classical forms with modern sensibilities, exemplified in Narrow Sea and Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, and her unique approach to sound and structure continues to redefine the boundaries of classical music.
