When you hear the word ‘composer’, probably the first thing that pops into your head are names such as Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach. You may think of a man in a powdered wig sitting at a piano, candle burning through the night, playing wildly on the keys. But composers are not all dead, white men. Gasp! Really?
Indeed, dead, white men are the most prominent, well-known, and revered composers. This can leave one feeling as if there is no room for women in the composing world. But fear not! Women have been composing and creating great music for just as long as men. It’s high time we shine the spotlight on someone besides Mozart and Beethoven. Here are five talented female composers (past and present) to add to your repertoire.
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Clara Schumann (1819-1896):
Composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.”
Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic era. As a child, she was a piano prodigy. As an adult, she taught piano and toured frequently, performing 238 concerts with Joseph Joachim. Her husband, Robert Schumann, was also a composer and they sometimes composed together. Her career spanned over 60 years, and she composed 66 works, according to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra website. Playing piano in concerts by memory was pioneered by Schumann and it is now the standard to do so.
Amy Beach (1867-1944):
Music is the superlative expression of life experience, and woman by the very nature of her position is denied many of the experiences that color the life of man.”
Amy Beach
Amy Beach was an American composer and pianist. According to her biography on the Library of Congress website, “Young Amy was a true prodigy who memorized forty songs at the age of one and taught herself to read at age three”. Beach helped to found the Society of American Women Composers in 1925 and is credited as the first successful female American composer. She published over 100 works during her lifetime, with more being published in recent years.
Florence Price (1887-1953):
Florence Price was an American composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher. Her mother, a music teacher, taught Price, and by age four she was playing and composing on the piano. She went to school at the New England Conservatory and graduated at 19. After school, she moved back to Arkansas, where she married Thomas J. Price and had two children. However, racism and lynchings forced them to move to Chicago. There she began to flourish as a composer. She won two first-place Rodman Wanamaker Music Awards, one for her Symphony in E minor, and the second for her Piano Sonata in E minor. Although she still faced setbacks because of race and gender, she gained recognition for her music during her lifetime. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, she composed over 300 pieces.
Xin Huguang (1933-2011):
Xin Huguang was a Chinese composer and composition teacher. She was born in Shanghai on October 16, 1933. In 1951, she enrolled in the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Huguang is known for her famous symphonic poem Gada Meilin (also spelled Gada Meiren and Ka Ta Mei Ling), which she composed at 23. The Gada Meilin was her graduate work. After graduation, she moved to Mongolia with her husband, Bao Yu Shan, and taught composition at the Inner Mongolian Arts School until 1980. She then worked as a composer for the Beijing Music and Dance Company. In 1991, she moved to America.
Unsuk Chin (1961- ):
My music is a reflection of my dreams. I try to render into music the visions of immense light and of an incredible magnificence of colours that I see in all my dreams, a play of light and colours floating through the room and at the same time forming a fluid sound sculpture. Its beauty is very abstract and remote, but it is for these very qualities that it addresses the emotions and can communicate joy and warmth.”
Unsuk Chin
Unsuk Chin is a South Korean composer internationally renowned for her music. She started learning music theory at a young age and went on to Seoul National University, where she studied composition. Her music is in the contemporary classical genre and she has received numerous awards for her work.
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These five composers created beautiful music, from symphonies to concertos. They created in ways no one thought of before. Did you know any of these composers before reading about them? If not, what does that say about who we champion in music? In the future, when you are listening to music, I encourage you to look for other female composers. Searching beyond the traditional horizon of “the greats” can lead to surprising, and often rewarding discoveries.
The Lighthouse 