Three notable women composers: (left to right) Amy Beach, Hildegard of Bingen and Clara Schumann

Our Saxophone Dreams concerts with Jess Gillam (11-13 March) feature music by a number of prominent female contemporary composers, and with International Women’s Day falling on 8 March, it’s the ideal opportunity to look in a bit more detail at the women who came before them. We’ve previously covered this within a specifically French context, but this article will take a broader view.

The majority of the earliest composers we know about in the Western tradition emerged from the church. Among them, the life of the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen is actually remarkably well-documented. This can be considered a reflection of the impressive array of disciplines in which she made her mark, taking in everything from medicine to philosophy, though she is perhaps best-known for the 70 musical works which have come down to us. An impressive number for a composer of the period (regardless of gender), these were collected in a single volume, known as the Wiesbaden Codex, in around 1200. Today, her renown is largely down to the success of Gothic Voices’ 1985 album A feather on the breath of God: it is entirely devoted to her music, which even gained recognition in the early 1990s club scene, when one of its tracks, O Euchari, was sampled by Orbital.

As composition took off outwith church walls to encompass secular circles, songs on courtly love became a popular genre, and the contributions of women composers brought a female perspective on the subject. They were still vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts, however, and it was arguably not until the 16th century that there is any sign of a flourishing of women composers, in Renaissance Italy. Several of them stand out by virtue of breaking new ground, including Vittoria Aleottis, the first woman to have a composition published (in 1591), and Francesca Caccini, the first to write an opera, 1625's La liberazione di Ruggiero.

Between them, the church and the nobility proved fertile ground for these composers, with other women turning to composition as an extension of their singing careers. Barbara Strozzi can be considered especially significant in this regard: chiefly known for her secular music, she is believed to have had more of this in print than any of her contemporaries, again regardless of gender. Many important female musicians would later emerge in her native Venice, for instance at the Ospedale della Pietà, where the resident orphans benefitted from the teaching and compositional skills of Antonio Vivaldi. The various 18th-century composers who might appear to belong to the della Pietà family (Michielina and Agata among them) are not actually blood relatives, but share a link through the musical training they received at this particular institution.

Women composers were starting to gain minor prominence in other countries too. The Englishman Henry Lawes acknowledged his student Mary Dering as the composer of some of the music in his 1655 Second book of airs, calling her ‘so good a Composer, that few of any sex have arriv’d to such perfection’. The slightly later composer known as Mrs Philarmonica is evidence of a trend more widely recognised in literature of the period: like Jane Austen, she was not named when her works (two books of chamber music) were published in around 1715, but her true identity remains a mystery.

At this point, there seems to have been an increasing tendency to sideline female musicians in general. An exception was made for singers (except in church choirs, where the purity of the treble voice was highly prized), but other performers were a rare phenomenon. Mozart’s sister Maria Anna – better known as Nannerl – serves as a prime example of this: a prodigiously talented harpsichordist from a young age, she all but stopped playing in public in her late teens. Although she did some teaching over the next few years, her later marriage brought this to an end; she only resumed her musical career as a well-to-do widow.

The social upheavals of the late 18th century undoubtedly affected the fortunes of women with a desire to compose. Prior to the French Revolution, many of these were high born – there were several to be found in the German duchies, including Maria Antonia, Electress of Saxony and the composer of two operas – but for most, composition was only one of their skills, often used to supplement an established career. Minna Brandes (whose parents’ backgrounds were in the theatre) was a noted actress and Caroline Wuiet turned to journalism as a means of survival when the French Revolution temporarily derailed her musical career.

Social strictures on women stayed firmly in place after the turn of the century. Composition became (if anything) even more of a boys’ club, especially when it came to the elevated form of the symphony: the general expectation was that female composers were better off concentrating on less demanding genres, for instance light music for the amateur pianist to play at home. Sad to relate, these attitudes were so pervasive that they affected two of the 19th century’s greatest women composers, Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann (to use the surnames by which they are best known to us).

Both overshadowed by the men in their lives – Fanny’s brother Felix and Clara’s husband Robert – they had low expectations of their own careers as composers. In Fanny Mendelssohn’s case, this was instilled from childhood: her father was much more supportive of her brother’s chances of making his living from music, telling her that “for you it can and must be no more than an adornment”, on top of which the Mendelssohns’ elevated social class also hindered her prospects as a professional pianist. Thankfully the siblings enjoyed a supportive relationship: Felix ensured some of his sister’s works reached publication (albeit under his name, another likely consequence of prevailing social attitudes), while Fanny was a trusted authority on her brother’s music in his absence, including during rehearsals for his oratorio St Paul.

Clara Schumann’s career as a composer dwindled considerably after her marriage, to the extent that her own husband wrote of how it disturbed him “to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out”. It never really resumed even after Robert’s early death (she was forty years a widow), but her reputation as a pianist grew steadily – we might in fact wish she had lived into the age of sound recording. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her Piano Concerto in A minor (which predates her husband’s by a decade) has particularly benefitted from the rediscovery of her compositions, ensuring the tide is now firmly in her favour.

The rise of feminism, particularly in terms of women’s suffrage, brought with it a wave of composers keen to use their skills to advance their cause. Chief among these was perhaps Ethel Smyth, whose 1910 March of the Women cemented her significance in this regard, though we should beware of viewing her through this narrow lens. Of her six operas, The Wreckers remains the best-known, and her Mass in D is still occasionally heard, but perhaps most remarkably, the US premiere of her cantata The Prison in 2018 has been followed by over 40 more performances there since, with more to come. Considering its first ever performance was at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, all the way back in 1931, a Scottish revival is surely overdue!

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Amy Beach made a bid for a different sort of freedom, being largely self-taught; unusually for the period, all her musical training was in America. This left her prey to cultural as well as misogynistic criticism when she spent a few years in Europe in the early 1910s, though one German critic called her “a possessor of musical gifts of the highest kind”. She had made her name with large-scale compositions including a Mass in E-flat and the Gaelic Symphony, but choral works (both sacred and secular) and songs make up a more substantial part of her oeuvre.

We will keep 20th-century women composers for a future article, but note only that acceptance of their equal standing with their male counterparts continued, if still at a slow pace. While the drive to recognise their achievements is far from over, some significant progress has been made in challenging the dominance of music by dead white men in concert programmes. (The fact we would now add heterosexual and cis-gender to this is a sign of our widening cultural spectrum.) It says a lot about engrained social values that we had to start by acknowledging the contribution of one entire half of the human race, but the many fine works that have come to light as a result are proof that it is a worthwhile as well as necessary process.