Born in Brooklyn in 1962, Jennifer Higdon grew up near Atlanta and in Appalachian Tennessee, teaching herself flute at 15 and playing drums in high school marching band… not beginning college composition studies until she was 21. Nevertheless, she earned degrees from Penn and the Curtis institute, where she would later teach composing.

From the studio… to the work camps… to the opera… and on to academia and America… Chen Yi is the most prominent woman of a generation of Chinese-born composers.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s career has been marked by several firsts: she was the first woman to graduate with a doctorate in composition from Julliard; she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music; and the first female composer to be mentioned in Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip Peanuts.

American Joan Tower did not originally intend to become a composer, but at 18 she wrote a piece for a college class and immediately thought, “I can do better”--- and, as she said in 2018, “for the next 60 years, I tried to do better.”

Scottish composer Thea Musgrave once had a dream in which a single clarinet player led the entire orchestra to mutiny--- a dream she realized in her 1967 Concerto for Orchestra.

Born Germaine Taillefesse… she changed her last name to spite her father, who tried to forbid her a career in music…Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of the famed generatios known as The Six.n of French composer

One composed brilliantly but died early in the 20th century… the other helped create the composers of the rest of the century. Sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger both achieved important firsts for women in music. Born into a Paris Conservatoire family, they showed their talent early: Nadia enrolled at the Conservatoire at the age of nine, and Lili tagged along with her to lessons… she was just four.

In 2009 a family began renovating an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, and were astonished to discover piles of paper throughout the home… music manuscripts. The papers, and the house, had once belonged to composer Florence Beatrice Price, the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra.

Imagine composing music that was praised by critics, and then being told only a man could have written it! That happened more than once to English-born composer Rebecca Clarke. Born in 1886, she began her musical life with the violin, eventually became the first female composition student of famed composer and teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford convinced her to switch to the viola, on which she became a virtuoso. She soon had to make use of that skill when she criticized her father for his extramarital affairs… and he abruptly withdrew his financial support for her schooling.

The first successful American woman composer of large-scale works, Amy Cheney could improvise counter-melodies at age two, taught herself to read music at three, and began playing her own works at her first public recitals at seven. From 16 to 18 she impressed Boston audiences with virtuosic performances of Chopin and Mendelssohn concertos.

She was one of the most popular composers in England and America at the turn of the 20th century, with one or more of her nearly 400 compositions found in almost every musical home, and the first woman composer to be elected Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor… but she was virtually forgotten her last three decades.

Augusta Holmès was born in 1847, of Irish parents living in Paris. To English speakers, her name appears as “Augusta Holmes,” but her strong empathy for France led her to spell and pronounce her name with a French accent.

Clara Wieck seemed destined to be a musician. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, one of the most respected piano teachers in Germany, taught her both piano and the business of being a practicing musician. To capitalize on the early 19th century fascination with child prodigies he arranged for her first solo concert in Leipzig’s Gewandhaus when she was just nine.

The Mendelssohn household was a hothouse of musical prodigy. Fanny Mendelssohn and her younger brother Felix soon outgrew their mother’s piano teaching abilities, entering the Berlin Singakademie in their teens. The two would be lifelong musical advisors to each other (creating their own Bach and Beethoven-influenced “Mendelssohnian” style) and Fanny would often serve as Felix’s surrogate, overseeing performances of his works.

Louise Farrenc came from a long family line of noted painters and sculptors, so maybe it should be no surprise she would be an artistic titan herself.

A celebrated early romantic Polish piano virtuoso moves to Paris and wows Europe… a decade before Frederic Chopin… and she is a She.

Though the charming miniature that today is most famously associated with her may have actually been a hoax, there’s no denying the success in her time… and triumph over odds… of Maria Theresia von Paradis.

There’s no place like home… especially if that home was the family apartment of classical composer Marianna von Martines. The family flat occupied the third floor of the Altes Michaelerhaus--- on a plaza shared with one of Vienna’s oldest churches, as well as the famed Old Burgtheater, where three of Mozart’s operas and Beethoven’s first symphony all premiered. 

The first woman in France to compose an opera, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre was born in 1665, a member of the instrument-making Jacquet family of Paris. A precocious musician, Elisabeth at age 5 was already performing harpsichord at the court of Louis XIV, and “The Sun King” would become an important patron of Jacquet de La Guerre… she would remain at court until it moved to the new palace at Versailles in 1682. Research assistance was provided by the WIU School of Music and Musicology students Joseph Crisler,Madalyn Pridemore, and Ethan Schuller.

A daughter of a nobleman, a lover of a nobleman, but never quite a member of the nobility itself, composer Barbara Strozzi lived, what seems to us, an unconventional life in Venice’s golden age. Research assistance was provided by the WIU School of Music and Musicology students Joseph Crisler,Madalyn Pridemore, and Ethan Schuller.

We know her now as a composer of atmospheric chant… but in her lifetime, Saint Hildegard von Bingen was better known as a theologian, herbalist, writer, leader of a religious order, and advisor and confidant of Popes. Research assistance was provided by the WIU School of Music and Musicology students Joseph Crisler,Madalyn Pridemore, and Ethan Schuller.