The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers

Matthew Head is Professor of Music at King's College London. His books include Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart's Turkish Music (2000) and Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Music (2013). He is currently writing a life and works of the English composer and singer Harriet Stewart (née Wainewright). Susan Wollenberg is Professor of Music (emerita) and Emeritus Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her recent publications include chapters in The Songs of Fanny Hensel (2021); Clara Schumann Studies (2021); and the Routledge Handbook of Women's Work in Music (2022). She co-edited, with Aisling Kenny, Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied (2015); and, with Mariateresa Storino, Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800–1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoire (2023).

List of figures; List of music examples; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Prologue: studies in women composers – the first fifty years Matthew Head and Susan Wollenberg; Part I. Themes in Studying Women Composers: 1. Historical women composers and the transience of female musical fame Paula Higgins; 2. In search of a feminist analysis Susan Wollenberg; 3. Composing women's history: beyond suppression and separate spheres Matthew Head; 4. Progress and professionalism Sophie Fuller; 5. Women composers and feminism Leah Broad; Part II. Highlighting Women Composers Before 1750: 6. Medieval women in composition and musical production Margot Fassler; 7. Sixteenth-century women composers, beyond borders Laurie Stras; 8. Women and composition, c. 1600–1750 Rebecca Cypess; Part III. Women Composers c. 1750–1880: Forms of Musical Culture: 9. Did women have a classical style? Matthew Head and Susan Wollenberg; 10. Women, song, and subjectivity in the nineteenth century Anja Bunzel and Stephen Rodgers; 11. Women, pianos, and virtuosity in the nineteenth century Joe Davies and Alexander Stefaniak; Part IV. Women Composers c. 1880–2000: New Waves: 12. First-wave feminism and professional status Sophie Fuller; 13. Women composers, experimentalism and technology, 1945–1980 Louise Gray; 14. Vibrations: women in sound art, 1980–2000 Gascia Ouzounian; Epilogue: composers' voices Nicola Lefanu, Roxanna Panufnik and Shirley J. Thompson; Bibliography; Index.