Women’s voices from the Common Era sixteenth century embodying their musical creativity, especially those from the continent of Europe, emerge most clearly from the written records of the courts and convents of the time. Clarity is, of course, relative: not only are named female composers many fewer than male composers, but also the music they created has not survived in the same quantities as that of their male counterparts. Since notated, attributed music is at the foundation of the critical frame for the appreciation of European music, and the means whereby European musicology has been able to know of and understand the musicians of the past, the imbalance in documentation has led to a truism: that women’s lack of access to education or the public sphere explains why there were comparatively few sixteenth-century female composers.

This chapter explores ways of thinking about ecology through the medium of composition, and how composing relates to the environments around us. It offers a methodological framework for composition that puts listening at the heart of a composer’s engagement with musical material and meaning making. Alongside the author’s examples there are a number of exercises and provocations to help developing one’s own approaches to composition.

This chapter is intended to invite composers at an earlier stage in their career to think about what their unique musical voice is, and how that might be influenced by the art and ideas existing around them. It concludes with some practical advice to help inspire composers to develop an understanding of what is most special about their musical instinct, imagination, and creativity.

Amidst debates of the early 1880s about the status of women in music, the English organist and scholar Stephen S. Stratton delivered a self-avowed ‘polemical’ paper at the 7 May 1883 meeting of the Musical Association.1 Entitled ‘Woman in Relation to Musical Art’, the talk included a list of women composers ‘drawn from many sources’ and compiled, he said, ‘as evidence that women have been engaged in composition for a longer period of time, and in more branches of the art, than is generally supposed’. Stratton’s ‘list’ consists in 389 names of mostly verifiable historical women dating back to the trobairitz Beatrix, Countess of Dia (twelfth century), each annotated with an approximate date of birth and the genres in which they had composed.2 Where Stratton unearthed this remarkable trove of information he does not say, although as co-author of the then forthcoming British Musical Biography (1897), he may well have been culling pre-existing reference works for information.3

The last years of the nineteenth century saw many high-profile performances in Britain, Europe, and the USA of complex, large-scale musical works composed by women. In 1890, for example, a distinctive four-movement orchestral Serenade by the British composer Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was performed at the Crystal Palace in London. In 1895 La Montagne, a drame lyrique in four acts and five tableaux by the French composer Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), her fourth opera, was premiered at the Paris Opéra while the ‘Gaelic’ Symphony by the American composer Amy Beach (1867–1944) was first heard in Boston’s Music Hall the following year, 1896. The ‘Gaelic’ Symphony went on to be widely performed in Europe and the United States, and was critically well received, with one reviewer of the premiere praising it as ‘high-reaching, dignified and virile’.1

This chapter gives a practical overview of writing for a variety of chamber music scenarios, from the traditional (e.g. string quartet) to the unusual (e.g. tuba trio). It describes how to respond to the existing canon of music for ensemble, as well as being creatively inspired by performers in rehearsal situations.

This chapter considers how notation has been used, questioned, and re-made by composers over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the ideologies behind notation as an interface between composer and performer, and offers some playful examples of notational strategies that invite collaboration with the performer by challenging assumed norms of interpretation and performance.

This chapter balances practical advice with aesthetic considerations to give an overview of a composer’s numerous roles in writing music for opera, dance, and theatre. The chapter begins with an overview of collaborative techniques and language, before understanding a bit more about how to shape musical ideas both by yourself and then through workshopping and rehearsal processes.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Lied provided women composers and performers with an important vehicle for self-expression, a means to assert their creativity and agency at a time when larger, more public forms of artistic expression were less accessible to them. Studying the Lied with reference to the contexts in which it was conceived, performed, and received provides crucial insights into the interpersonal relationships fostered by music-making during this period. Equally important, analysing Lieder with these contexts in mind shows how such relationships were refracted through the prism of song. Both lines of enquiry – one historical, the other analytical – unite in an effort to uncover what Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg have described as the ‘personal stamp’ that female composers and performers placed on the nineteenth-century Lied.1 It is this ‘personal stamp’ – this expression of female creativity and agency – which we understand in this chapter as female subjectivity.

How do composers discover new sounds with old instruments? This chapter looks at the relationship between composers and instruments, and explores how responding to instrument design and experiementing with performing techniques and physical materials can create radical and exciting new sounds and ideas.

This introduction briefly explores the relationship between compositional choice and stylistic expectation or ideology. With new music now a plethora of styles and approaches, how might we understand work that’s happening currently in the context of historical and social influence?

This chapter explores the voice as a complex, expressive instrument. It begins by outlining voice types, techniques, and styles – ranging from opera to musical theatre and popular music –  before looking at the relationship between language and music, and finally exploring the nature of idiomatic vocal writing and so-called extended techniques. The chapter finishes with a nod to the future of vocal music by briefly thinking about the voice in conjunction with electronics.

This chapter is about how a composer can reach their audience. It thinks about marketing in broad terms, understanding the music industry in terms of networks and communities, as well as addressing topics like making and releasing recordings, best practice on social media, building a website and engaging with the press.