I recently realized you never hear of old-timey/classical women composers. Surely they were around?
Clara Schumann is now-a-days getting a lot more recognition as a composer, whereas she was mostly known as a performer and wife to Robert Schumann during her lifetime.
Women‽ Making music‽ How absurd, everyone knows that it’s 1679 and women aren’t allowed to touch things that aren’t kitchen utensils and babies, they can’t even read! Oh sirrah, how deliciously you delight me with notions of “famous women!”
But seriously, that was prolly similar to answers you would have gotten from people of that day, sadly. :/
Nope. Because in those days, unless they were wealthy, women worked.
Yes.
There were also composers of color working in Europe contemporaneously.
You don’t hear about them either. The reason is what you’d expect.
Names/examples would be awesome?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_de_Saint-Georges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bridgetower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Magdalena_Bach (there’s some scholarly thinking that she may have done some of Johann Sebastian’s work)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cécile_Chaminade (personal favorite)
There’s an extensive Wikipedia list of female composers as well. Someone already mentioned Clara Schumann. Nadia Boulanger was hugely influential if not widely performed as well.
Predating all of them by some centuries, you could maybe check out work by Hildegard of Bingen. I don’t know enough to suggest any particular piece but I’ve heard one or two pieces and they’re beautiful.
Yeah, I really like this one.
Louise Farrenc is the one I’m aware of, and this is my favourite piece of hers. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the other works in the classical canon and is noteworthy regardless of its composer being a woman.
She predates Mozart by many decades but I like her harpsichord suite: https://bachtrack.com/composer/de-la-guerre
I don’t remember where I got this list but here are some notables I felt the need to write down.
- Dora Pejacevió
- Alma Mahler
- Francesca Caccini
- Lili Boulanger
- Melanie Bonis
- Peggy Glanville-Hicks
- Margaret Bonds
- Cécile Chaminade
I forgot who it was, but one of them had a female student they wanted to bone. So they gave her stupid easy parts because she wasn’t that good. Then she made it clear she wasn’t interested and he gave her an actual part everyone else was doing then kicked her out of the school because she sucked.
Edit. Looked it up because it was bugging me. It was Beethoven and the girl was Therese Malfatti. They think he named Für Elise actually Für Therese after her, but he had super sloppy hand writing and people thought it was Elise.
