This brief introduction asks what a compositional technique actually is, and what sorts of skills, knowledge, and experience a composer needs to draw on when working with music and sound. It thinks first about the idea of musical genre and function, before briefly addressing musical technology, style, and finally the importance of listening as a core compositional technique.

This chapter examines ways of working as a composer for screen, explaining every step of the process – from reading through a script or treatment to the final recordings and edits – and offers advice on how to approach collaboration and networking in the film industry.

Our knowledge and understanding of Western classical music – its history, culture, criticism, and analysis, and our encounters with music directly as performers and listeners – rest on a number of fundamental resources: dictionaries and encyclopaedias, histories of music, analytical and critical studies, and repertoire in editions as well as cultivated in performance, whether live or recorded. This rich, interlocking array of resources has traditionally and systematically either sidelined or ignored totally the contribution of women as composers to the musical culture it represents. This volume builds on the remarkable transformation in musical scholarship since the 1970s that has, on the one hand, sought to create for women the kinds of resources formerly assembled exclusively for male composers, and, on the other hand, applied feminist thinking to the institutions, discourses, values, and silences that have characterized music history itself.

Writers and scholars define the period of first-wave feminism in the Western world in various ways. For some the first ‘wave’ grew out of the demands for equality from women during the French Revolution, for others it had its roots in the Women’s Rights Convention in New York, United States, in 1848. However, it is generally agreed that the period 1880–1920 saw the height of feminist activity from a wide variety of women in Britain, Europe, and the United States.1

Women organized together to demand rights to employment and education, and most agreed that the right to suffrage, being able to vote and take part in political power, was fundamentally important. By 1920, certain women in Canada, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the United States, had been granted the right to vote. But full suffrage was not granted to women in the UK until 1928, in France not until 1944, and Italy not until 1945, for example.2

This chapter explores the importance of adapting for a composer, whether that be in their own creative practice (for example by adapting stories for the stage or screen) or in their engagement with others’ works through arrangements or orchestrations. It considers what a suitable definition of adaptation might be, and where the boundaries of originality might lie in adapting someone else’s work, before arguing that adaption necessitates a valuable set of composition skills that require us to think actively and conscientiously about our role in history and society.

This chapter considers the relationship between composing and nationality, examining what happens when musical influence and practice are reimagined across traditions and cultures. It looks at several case studies to unpick geographical, social, political, and racial musical associations, and reflects critically on composing outside the colonial dominance of Western-centric musical practices.

Musical composition in the Middle Ages involved many processes far removed from what is understood to constitute the subject in the twenty-first century. Whether one considers men or women in the medieval period, it makes the greatest sense to speak about musical production across a broad spectrum of activities including: singing within communities; teaching and learning music (most often through singing); copying and/or commissioning musical, theoretical, and liturgical texts; setting preexisting pieces with new texts (the most common compositional process in Western Europe); recombining older musical materials in new ways; adapting new music or texts (or both) to preexisting circumstances; and lastly introducing completely new pieces or bits of pieces, usually within the context of preexisting materials.1 Scholars have known for decades that women had agency in all these categories; each of them required musical knowledge and creativity.2

This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

In her 1880 memoir, the American pianist Amy Fay described the sheer virtuosity and professional ambition of the numerous young women pianists she encountered.

This chapter discusses the elusive meaning of ‘inspiration’, and considers what it might feel like, the situations where it might occur, and how to harness and understand it when it does. It finally explores the idea of ‘happy accidents’ and thinks about the relationship between habit and practice as active methods of inspiration in contrast to the more passive Romantic notion of divine intervention.