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.

In her lecture ‘The public voice of women’, Mary Beard begins with Homer’s Odyssey and the ‘first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up”’. Penelope, patient wife of adventuring Odysseus, requests that a bard sing happier tunes; her son, Telemachus, is not impressed. ‘“Mother”, he says, “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household”’.1 With this moment, Beard highlights continuity between antiquity and the present, revealing the importance of female silencing to male identity. Telemachus, she observes, becomes a man by confining Penelope, setting her out of sight and hearing. Her silence amplifies his voice.

Speaking at the start of Sisters with Transistors (2020), Lisa Rovner’s documentary film on women working in electronic music, the New York-based composer and software engineer Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945) identifies, not, as we might expect, the power of a tape machine to rework, with radical and infinite possibility, the sound palette available to the composer, but rather its promise to change the social and economic structure of music, to break apart gender differentials, and to explode power structures. This, first and foremost, is the emancipatory promise of machines that make music.

Spiegel’s musical education encompassed elements of a conventional compositional training followed by an early, and lengthy, immersion in the New York electronic studios created by Morton Subotnick in the late 1960s, and then at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, nearby in New Jersey, where she developed software for computer graphics.2

This final chapter offers advice on the opportunities and challenges of being a composer, and is intended to be useful and encouraging for anyone developing their practice. It suggests ways to build a professional profile through growing networks and understanding effective working habits.

Among women composers circa 1600–1750, a handful of names are well known today: among these are Francesca Caccini (1587–after 1641), Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665–1729), all of whom composed a large quantity of music, published substantial books of their compositions, and were recognized by authoritative (most often male) musicians, critics, and listeners. Their music appears in concert programmes and recordings, and they may be understood to form part of a canon of women composers from the Baroque era. Recognition of these prominent women (if not yet widespread familiarity with their work) is surely a triumph of feminist musicology and performance in the past forty years.

Yet the attention paid to these prominent women has yielded a misunderstanding of women’s compositional practice during the period – namely that only a handful of women engaged in composition.

This chapter offers a thorough overview of choral composition from its historical foundations in the church to modern trends in choral music today. It outlines technical issues around text setting, writing for specific voice types, notation, and tips for writing for amateur or less experienced groups.

‘I don’t think you intend to be discouraging in your book. I think you have merely overlooked those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population.’1

The words of Reta, in Carol Shields’s Unless, are applicable to the analysis of women composers’ works. Among areas forming a musical canon, the sub-discipline of musical analysis has only recently displayed awareness of the attention to women composers and their music that has taken root in the practice and productions of musicology over the past few decades. Yet at the time from the 1980s onwards when literature on women composers began to present a significant challenge to the pedagogical canon, a new wave of interest in analysis was sparking the publication of textbooks and journals that could have offered an opportunity to include women’s works as valid subjects for analytical interpretation.2

This chapter presents an understanding of compositional practice based fundamentally on sound and space, and looks at a range of case studies that explore the harmonic, timbral, and material consequences of this approach. The chapter concludes by arguing that the variety of approaches discussed succeed because the concern with sound permeates every stage of compositional thinking and does not just manifest in specific compositional techniques.

This section thinks about the relationship between compositional creativity, labour, and money. It outlines how artistic freedom and agency have often been inversely related to stable income, and suggests some ways that composers today might navigate these elements in order to monetise their work.

What is a composer, and what do they do? This introduction explores the idea of composition – in both Western traditions and further afield. It begins by tracing a brief cultural history of the composer in the classical music tradition and their shifting role in society, before considering a range of narratives and definitions of composition, challenging us to think about what the word ‘composition’ might mean for us in the twenty-first century.

The extraordinary growth of scholarship on women composers in recent decades inspires not only female inclusion in traditionally all-male historical narratives but also reappraisal of the period styles that structure those narratives. Does the music of women composers follow patterns of change enshrined in such heirloom categories of music history as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic? What is the critical potential of women’s work as composers for rewriting music-historical surveys? With the music of around 400 female composers of the eighteenth century now known to survive, the field is established for the appraisal of women composers’ relationship to the Classical period, and the ‘Viennese Classical Style’ associated with it.1

The formerly dependable terms invoked thus far – period, Classical, Viennese, and style – deserve rethinking.

This chapter considers techniques of musical development through the lens of solo monodic (i.e. single line) musical works. It explores a range of approaches to melody, development, vertical-horizontal relationships, and expression, suggesting ways to unfold and expand musical ideas that are rooted in sonority and dramaturgy.

This chapter explores a range of approaches, motivations, and sounding results of working with electronics, and in doing so offers tools and methods to decolonise existing, institution-centred histories of music in this genre. The chapter concludes with three specific examples of contemporary musicians at the cutting-edge of work in this area.

This brief introduction outlines some of the things that composers might do when they compose, examining how the way composers and think and work is tangled together with the conditions and procedures surrounding the, and how they work.