Chapter 4 discusses the situation of contemporary female composers and poses the question of the extent to which they are ‘still exceptional’. Ranging across a wide range of figures, Astrid Kvalbein considers how contemporary women, such as Kaija Saariaho, Jennifer Walsh, and Lotta Wennäkoski, explore feminist themes and provide gender critiques through their works; the tendency for women, including Judith Weir, Olga Neuwirth, and Du Yun, to engage with wider societal issues; the strategies women, such as Unsuk Chin, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Liza Lim have adopted to respond to an increasingly globalised world; and how composers such as Natasha Barrett and Jana Winderen have explored environmental issues through their music.

In Chapter 10, Katherine Williams consider female songwriters, focusing upon singer-songwriters who write and perform their own material, as opposed to songwriters who compose material for other artists. Concentrating upon four case studies, Williams interrogates the music of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, and Adele.

Moving forward to the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Chapter 14 provides a survey of contemporary female and gender-non-conforming artists using electronics for music. Margaret Schedel and Flannery Cunningham highlight how greater access to affordable means to manipulate digital sound from the autonomy of personal computers – away from difficult-to-access studios staffed by technicians and equipped with complex technology, which were previously largely the domain of male ‘experts’ – has opened up electronic music to a wider demographic of people (in terms of gender, race, and class). Taking an ethnographic approach which draws upon questionnaire material from twenty-four respondents variously identifying as composers, sound artists, instruments builders, and programmers, this chapter explores some of this diversity through the artists’ own words.

In her practitioner contribution, Manuella Blackburn presents an an exploration of how motherhood, and a new interest in domestic sound sources, inspired by prolonged time spent in the home during pregnancy and the early days of motherhood, changed her compositional practice.

Chapter 16, ‘Women in the Music Industries: The Art of Juggling’, considers the persistent male-dominated nature of the popular music industry and the space which contemporary FIMAs (Female Independent Music Artists) have carved out within it to sustain portfolio careers. Clare K. Duffin also presents two detailed case studies of Glasgow-based FIMAs, Emma Gillespie and Carol Laula.

Chapter 12 presents a discussion of female solo artists in the popular music industry, with a particular focus on the influence and lasting effects of MTV and superstar branding. Through considering the careers of Tina Turner, Sinéad O’Connor, Alanis Morissette, and Fiona Apple, Kristin J. Lieb probes the recurring themes of the human sacrifice of being a pop star, the sharing of narratives about abuse and exploitation, the recasting of the hot mess as a survivor, and the exploration of taboo subjects and identities.

Chapter 7, ‘Most of My Sheroes Don’t Appear on a Stamp: Contextualising the Contributions of Women Musicians to the Progression of Jazz’, considers the vital part that women – both vocalists and instrumentalists – made to the development of jazz, although they have tended to be excluded from standard historiographical narratives of the genre. With a focus on the development of jazz in the United States, Tammy L. Kernodle considers women jazz musicians’ work from the early days of New Orleans jazz, through jazz in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Europe, to the emergence of women jazz singers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and to the all-girl swing bands of the 1940s.

Chapter 8 turns to the girl groups of the 1960s. Although often not taken seriously, they were one of the most successful musical phenomena of the first half of the 1960s in the United States. Jacqueline Warwick skilfully unpacks ‘girl culture’, the intersection of the girl groups with the contemporaneous civil rights movement, and key figures and groups of the era, such as the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Supremes.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus to female performers within the classical music industry. Francesca Placanica considers the increased opportunities which female performers, both singers and instrumentalists, gained throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not only in terms of being able to achieve star status, but also through being able to integrate into professional orchestras. Focusing upon the trumpeter Alison Balsom and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, she considers the new opportunities that have developed over recent decades for women to maintain careers as virtuosa performers of instruments historically deemed unsuitable for women to play. Placanica also deftly probes the high degree of sexualisation which many contemporary performers, including Yuja Wang, Katherine Jenkins, and Vanessa Mae, face in the contemporary classical music industry and how this can be negotiated in a mediatised culture.

Louis Niebur’s chapter 13, ‘Case Studies of Women in Electronic Music: The Early Pioneers’, considers a range of the earliest ground-breaking women working with electronic music, including Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the UK, and Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, and Suzanne Ciani, in the US.