Women Composers Project - five years of composers
TMI Founder, Hannah Lee Tungate, started Women Composers Project as just a fun coffee break research task, and it quickly became so much more. Here’s Hannah’s reflection on WCP’s creation and impact.
On the 1st March 2018, I was sat having a coffee by myself, and pondering if I could fill each day of Women’s History Month with a post on instagram about a woman composer—just highlighting who they were and their music. I had organised the first ‘Celebration of Women Composers’ concert in April 2017 for the UWA Music Students’ Society and was starting to plan the second. I knew there were heaps of women composers out there but no one seemed to be performing them. So, surely I could fill a month. It turns out that of course, I could…and now five March’s later I’ve shared 158 composers via WomenComposersProject (which is only a teeny-tiny portion of the composers out there! Check out DONNE's Big List of over 5000!).
When I started this project in 2018, there weren’t many easily accessible resources available. Some of my favourite resources now, such as Kassia Database, Donne & Piano Music She Wrote, were only just starting up – Donne launched on IWD 2018, Kassia launched in 2019, and PMSW launched in 2020. It was difficult to find information about women composers outside of an academic setting other than a ClassicFM article or checking out wikipedia. That’s not to say there weren’t resources, they just weren’t straight forward to find and most locked behind a paywall if you weren’t at an academic institution.
Thankfully since 2018, there seems to have been a collective awakening of musicians. I have seen so many small to medium organisations pop up in the last five years, all aiming to amplify voices of women that have been left unheard. The community we have all found together is amazing, just a bunch of women supporting women trying to elevate the voices of women lost to history, women who are overshadowed, and women whose works were credited to someone else. There's such a breadth of stories out there to hear, and a massive amount of music we're yet to listen to. There's so many resources and databases out there now that we really have no excuse not to perform or listen to this music!
It is also important to recognise the feminist musicology and the study of women in music is not a recent phenomenon. There have been many trailblazers in this area since the late 1970s. However, what I have observed is that this new wave since 2018 has meant that far more people outside of academia are talking about it. We’re beginning to see small cultural shifts in repertoire choices, and organisations with quotas have been steadily increasing their representation meaning that some historical women composers are now considered ‘mainstream’. There’s still a long way to go until programming choices have any kind of parity (see our numbers on orchestral programming). This shift in attitude is still small and is still very much led by women, but it is undoubtedly a shift.
While Women Composers Project had the sole focus of highlighting women composers, there was never a succinct way to capture that the project was for any group of individuals who have been oppressed by the patriarchal norms of our society. I’ve long recognised this odd position where calling it ‘women’ composers project goes a certain way to reinforcing the gender binary. This is of course the opposite of what I set out to do. I set out to amplify the voices of those who have been marginalised and oppressed. WCP was always for composers whose works were or are not given the proper attention due to their gender identity or perceived gender – in short so long as they were not cis men, I would include them in WCP. I stuck with the name because it’s a great entry point for people who are new to underrepresented composers, I know many people who discovered composers through this project just because they searched “women composers”. However, what is truly needed to move forward is better intersectionality. Part of TMI being about “promoting the work of diverse and underrepresented musicians” is because it’s not just women who need amplifying. We need to address issues of oppression via sexism, alongside racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia in the classical music world and beyond.
Women Composers Project is currently a small fish in an only slightly larger pond. We need more discussions in the mainstream industry to see long-lasting meaningful change. At Tenth Muse Initiative, we hope to add to this shift in attitudes and not only perform more works by underrepresented composers but add to the accessibility of this music. There’s a long way to go, but we’re looking forward to the ride.
If you want to learn more number of our favourite organisations can be found on our resources page.
All 158 composers posted on WCP since 2018
