Today major orchestras and artists are commissioning young women composers to write music for them. Here are three rising stars. Missy Mazzoli was selected as a featured composer by the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer’s Institute more than a decade ago. We

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was the first woman composer ever to be awarded with the legion d‘honneur in 1913. The composer Ambroise Thomas said, “This is not a woman who composes, but a composer who is a woman.” Chaminade was well

We are now delving into the 20th and 21st century with a few more outstanding women composers who wrote cello music. Florence Price (1887-1953), an American pianist, composer, organist, and teacher, is not only the first African American woman to

If I could take only one style of music to a deserted island it would have to be Baroque music. Music written during that period is full of drama and energy, and it can be very intimate or simply grandiose.

Musicologists have suggested that “the life of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847) is compelling proof that women’s failure to compete with men on the compositional playing-field has been the result of social prejudice and patriarchal mores, which in the nineteenth century

In his seminal study on counterpoint and fugue, Alfred Mann writes, “There is probably no branch of musical composition in which theory is more widely, one might almost say hopelessly, at variance with practice than fugue.” Basically, Mann is telling

Continuing our series, I’d like to focus on the cello music of three additional women composers, artists whom I’ve previously featured. Amy Beach, (1867-1944) is one of the first American woman to be recognized as a composer. Her ‘Gaelic’ Symphony,

Clara Wieck-Schumann (1819-1896) confided in her diary, “a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that.” Her husband Robert was supportive