Charles Petzold

Every day for over two months now, I’ve been posting YouTube videos on Facebook of the music of women composers arranged chronologically in birthyear order. Last month, I consolidated the first 30 into the blog entry A Month of Women Composers, which spans birthyears from 810 (Kassia) to 1887 (Nadia Boulanger).

All blog entries on women composers have now been consolidated in the new web site Women Composing.

Here are the next 30 installments of women composers with birthyears of 1892 through 1938. As with the earlier postings, I have relied on Wikipedia for biographical information, although sometimes supplemented with information from other websites, and sometimes the composer’s own website.

Obviously there’s more to come.

Germaine Tailleferre (1892 – 1983)

Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse was born at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France. She changed her name in an attempt to dissociate herself from her father, who had refused to let her study music. She entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 12 and supported herself by giving music lessons. She began composing as a teenager.

Over the years Germaine Tailleferre associated with many other French composers. Erik Satie once called her his “musical daughter,” and Maurice Ravel was another influence on her work. In 1920 a journalist referred to a group of six composers living and working in Montparnasse as “Les Six.” Germaine Tailleferre was the only woman in the group, which also included Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc. She wrote this short but fascinating string quartet between 1917 to 1919:

Germaine Tailleferre had a long compositional career. Her works date from 1909 to 1982, including some orchestral music, but much more for piano, voice and piano, and small ensembles. She lived in Philadelphia during WW II but moved back to France afterwards. In the 1950s, she composed some operas and chamber operas.

Germaine Tailleferre composed this three-movement Sonata for Harp in 1953 and then revised it in 1957. The first movement incorporates some habanera rhythms, while the slow second movement begins inauspiciously but becomes quite captivating. The final movement is an intricate and energetic perpetuum mobile.

Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918)

Lili Boulanger accomplished what her older sister Nadia had failed at: She became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for composition.

She was born in Paris as Marie-Juliette Olga Boulanger. She was called Lili and often “petite Lili.” She displayed musical talent at a very early age. She was about six years younger than Nadia but began studying at the Paris Conservatoire by tagging along with her sister. This Nocturne for Violin and Piano is an early composition dating from 1911:

At a very early age, Lili contracted bronchial pneumonia. She was ill and very often in pain for the remainder of her life. It is speculated now that she might have suffered from Crohn’s disease, but at the time she was diagnosed with intestinal tuberculosis. Illness hampered her ability to compose and to travel.

She won the Prix de Rome on her second try in 1913 with her half-hour cantata Faust et Hélène with a text based on Goethe’s Faust. Entries for the Prix de Rome were often deliberately bland without innovation or experimentation, but Lili Boulanger’s entry does display a Debussyan impressionistic influence.

A few years later, Lili Boulanger began discussing the possibility of an opera with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote the play Pelléas and Mélisande that became the basis of Debussy’s opera. But this never happened.

Lili Boulanger wrote some piano music and chamber music, but a considerable amount of choral and orchestral music as well. Many of her compositions were unpublished or destroyed, and they are now considered lost. What remains is tantalizing for what it reveals of the composer who might have been.

Lili Boulanger wrote the first version of D’un matin de printemps ("On a Spring Morning") for violin and piano, then adapted it for violin, cello, and piano, and then as a duet for flute and piano. In January 1918, she composed the orchestral version of D’un matin de printemps that is performed in the video below. She died two months later at the age of 24.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901 – 1953)

Ruth Crawford was born about six months into the new century, and fittingly is possibly the earliest born woman to compose in a distinctively modernist style. She was also Pete Seeger’s stepmother.

Ruth Porter Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, but her family moved to Akron, St. Louis, Muncie, and Jacksonville, Florida. There she began piano lessons, continuing at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago in 1921, where she also turned her attention to composition. Here is her Five Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg dating from 1929:

In 1929, Ruth Crawford began studying composition with musicologist, composer, and folklorist Charles Seeger. The following year, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship: “Appointed for creative work in musical composition, abroad; tenure, twelve months from August 1, 1930,” the first woman to win one for composition. While in Europe she met Alban Berg in Vienna and Béla Bartók in Budapest. Here is a short Piano Study for Mixed Accents that she composed in 1930:

Ruth Crawford married Charles Seeger in 1932. At about the same time, she stopped actively composing to focus more on family and chronicling American folk music in connection with the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Her four children (Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny) all became involved in folk music, and her stepson Pete, who was about 13 at the time of Ruth Crawford’s marriage to his father, also became a folksinger of note.

Most of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s compositions date from 1922 to 1932. This 1931 String Quartet, which she wrote while abroad on the Guggenheim Fellowship, is among her most famous works. (Here’s a New York Times article about the composer and the quartet.) It has four movements, but they run together: The second movement begins at 3:38 in this video, and following a fermata rest, the third movement begins at 5:57.

The third movement is the most radically conceived, featuring long notes marked with crescendos and diminuendos in a type of pulsing counterpoint. (This movement was later adapted into an Andante for Strings for performance by orchestras.) Here are measures 19 through 24 showing how the notes played by four instruments swell in relation to each other:

The full score is available on the IMSLP site. After a final fade out to pppp, the fourth movement starts attacca at 9:07 and consists of a duet of sorts alternating between a staccato first violin and the other instruments playing in rhythmic unison. The first violin has the final word.

In marriage and with raising children, she devoted more time to studies of folk music, and publishing collections of folk music for children. One exception is the Suite for Wind Quintet composed in 1952 shortly before her death:

Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989)

Undine Smith Moore was the granddaughter of slaves but became known as the “Dean of Black Woman Composers.”

She grew up in an area of Virginia with a large African American population. She sang at the neighborhood Baptist church and started piano lessons at the age of 7. Her college education began at Fisk (an historically black college), after which she got a scholarship to Juilliard, and later attended Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music.

Undine Smith Moore was part of the Harlem Renaissance and a strong supporter of the emerging Civil Rights movement. She later wrote

One of the most evil effects of racism in my time was the limits it placed upon the aspirations of blacks, so that though I have been “making up” and creating music all my life, in my childhood or even in college I would not have thought of calling myself a composer or aspiring to be one.

Undine Smith Moore wrote mostly choral music and music for voice and piano, but also solo piano music and chamber music. Her 1981 choral and orchestral composition Scenes from the Life of a Martyr about Martin Luther King was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

This is her 1972 arrangement of an African American spiritual Watch and Pray:

A video of Undine Smith Moore’s Afro-American Suite is included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Zara Aleksandrovna Levina (1906 – 1976)

Zara Aleksandrovna Levina was born in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family living in Simferopol, now the second largest city in Crimea. She studied piano at the Odessa Conservatory, and piano and composition at the Moscow Conservatory.

As a Soviet-era composer, Zara Levina was almost exactly contemporaneous with Dmitri Shostakovich, but she was much less known. It is likely that none of her music was ever performed outside the USSR during her lifetime. In 1976, the New York Times marked her death with the following brief notice:

MOSCOW, July 1 (Reuters) — Zara Levina. a Soviet composer, has died after illness, the Tass press agency reported. She was 70. Most of her works were written for children but she also composed other songs and chamber works.

That short notice fails to mention that Zara Levina also composed two marvelous piano concertos in 1942 and 1975, but there are currently no live performances of them on YouTube. This is her Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 from 1952. The three movements were posted on YouTube in separate videos:

Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens (1906 – 1983)

Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London. Her father was architect Edwin Lutyens and her mother was Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, the granddaughter of prolific Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Last Days of Pompeii). From the Bulwer-Lytton line of the family, Elizabeth Lutyens acquired in interest in the mystical and occultist strain of Christianity known as Theosophy.

Elisabeth Lutyens showed an early interest in composition. She attended the École Normale de Musique in Paris and the Royal College of Music in London. She married twice and had four children, but for decades struggled with depression and alcoholism.

Elisabeth Lutyens revolted against the pastoral folk tradition prevalent in English music. In a lecture she gave in the 1950s, she referred to English composers such as Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Arnold Bax, and Frederick Delius as the “cowpat school” whose compositions were characterized by “folky‐wolky melodies on the cor anglaise.”

Her own compositions — which stretch from the late 1930s to the early 1980s and include everything from piano music to opera — were much less compromising and often incorporate distinctive modernist idioms, including atonality and ragged rhythms.

She moonlighted as a composer of movie music and became the first British woman to score a feature film. She came to specialize in horror films, including Paranoic (1963), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), and Theatre of Death (1967). Some of these soundtracks are available on YouTube. Here’s music from The Earth Dies Screaming:

The Valley of Hatsu-Se (Opus 62) from 1965 is a marvelous setting of Japanese poetry for soprano accompanied by flute, clarinet, cello, and piano, here performed by the Manchester-based Psappha Ensemble.

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907 –1994)

Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born to Irish parents in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, England. Her family moved to Dublin where Elizabeth studied piano and theory with private instructors, and then to London, where she began attending the Royal College of Music.

At RCM Elizabeth Maconchy studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who encouraged her to find her own voice. That voice was most influenced not by English composers but by the music of Béla Bartók, both for his use of small motifs to build larger textures, and for his driving rhythms. The music of Leoš Janáček seems to have been another influence.

In 1930, Maconchy’s 17-minute symphonic suite The Land (based on the book-length poem by Vita Sackville-West) was performed at the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall, which earned headlines such as “Girl Composer Triumphs.”

That same year, she married William LeFanu, a librarian for the Royal College of Surgeons. This was now an era when husbands encouraged their wives to compose. After hearing The Land, Gustav Holst told LeFanu to “Keep her at it.” He responded: “She’s kept at it of her own accord, I think.” In 1932, Betty (as she was called) contracted tuberculosis, which would affect her health for the rest of her life. At the age of 80, she became the second woman composer to be honored as a Dame of the British Empire.

Although Maconchy composed operas and orchestral works, the core of her oeuvre are 13 string quartets composed between the early 1930s and the early 1980s. She said:

I have found the string quartet above all best suited to the expression of the kind of music I want to write — music as an impassioned argument …

Dramatic and emotional tension is created by means of counterpoint in much the same way as happens in a play. The characters are established as individuals, each with his own differentiated characteristics: the drama then grows from the interplay of these characters — the clash of their ideas and the way in which they react upon each other.

Thus in a string quartet one has the perfect vehicle for dramatic expression of this sort: four characters engaged in statement and comment, passionate argument, digression, restatement, perhaps final agreement — the solution of the problem.(quoted in Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens by Rhiannon Mathias)

Here is her String Quartet No. 1 composed in 1932 to 1933:

This is her String Quartet No. 3 from 1938.

These are movements 1 and 2 from her final String Quartet No. 13 from 1982 – 1983:

Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004)

Zenobia Powell was born in Boley, Oklahoma, a town that had been incorporated just a few years earlier. The population consisted of predominantly Black descendants of people enslaved by the Muscogee Creek indigenous people.

One of Zenobia Powell’s grandfathers had been enslaved, and he was still alive when she was young. It was from him that she first heard traditional African American spirituals. She also learned piano and violin, studying privately with African American composer Robert Nathaniel Dett and then at the Tuskegee Institute with William L. Dawson, another early African American composer.

Perry spent most of her life teaching music and only came to composition later. This Sonatine for Clarinet and Piano is from 1963:

Her 1985 opera Tawawa House is set in 1852 at a real-life hotel in Ohio that became a stop on the underground railroad and was later the site of Wilberforce College, the first black-owned college in the United States. This haunting aria from Tawawa House is entitled “Up Over My Head (I See Freedom in the Air)”:

A video of Zenobia Powell Perry’s Threnody is included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909 – 1969)

Grażyna Bacewicz was born in Łódź, Poland. She received her first piano and violin lessons from her father, and then began studying at the Warsaw Conservatory, continuing in Paris at the École Normale de Musique studying violin and composition with Nadia Boulanger.

She combined composition with playing violin, including with the Polish Radio Orchestra. Some of her compositions date from the 1920s, but she focused exclusively on composing following injuries sustained in a car crash in 1954.

Grażyna Bacewicz wrote music in a variety of genres, including incidental music for plays, film scores, ballet works, choral music, songs, orchestral works, chamber music, and works for solo piano and violin. Between 1937 and 1965 she composed seven violin concertos.

This is her Concerto for String Orchestra from 1948.

Dana Suesse (1911 – 1987)

Nadine Dana Suesse was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her mother was an opera singer, and she began playing piano at an early age. She later pursued a more formal study of piano under a pupil of Franz Liszt, and composition under one of George Gershwin’s teachers. After the war, she studied composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger.

Dana Suesse composed many popular songs, including “You Ought to Be in Pictures,” “Whistling in the Dark,” “My Silent Love,” and “Blue Moonlight,” but she also composed jazz-influenced music for piano and for orchestra, often with piano. Here is her 1931 piano composition Jazz Nocturne:

Pianist Sara Davis Buechner has recorded an entire album of Dana Suesse piano music under the title Jazz Nocturne.

In 1932, bandleader Paul Whiteman — best known today for his 1924 premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music” in Aeolian Hall — commissioned Dana Suesse for a piano concerto. Concerto in Three Rhythms was premiered at Whiteman’s fourth “Experiment in Modern Music” concert at Carnegie Hall.

Here’s a recent performance of Concerto in Three Rhythms, unfortunately without video:

In 1933, she was profiled in a “Talk of the Town” in the December 16, 1933 issue of The New Yorker under the title “Girl Gershwin":

We are going to press too early to know what the public reception will be of “Eight Valses for Piano and Orchestra” that Paul Whiteman is playing at the Metropolitan December 15th, but we know something about the composer, Miss Dana Suesse. It’s pronounced “Sweez.” She is only twenty-one, and is known as “the girl Gershwin” because she’s good at both Tin Pan Alley and symphonic stuff...

Miss Suesse was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was one of those prodigies. She began to fool around with the piano at about two. She didn’t take lessons for seven years after that, but at four she could play the Sextette from “Lucia” rather creditably, as she recalls. She learned it from a phonograph record. When she was eight, she composed her first piece, calling it, redundantly, “Evening Sunset."... When she was sixteen she refused a scholarship at a Chicago conservatory and came to New York to study piano with Alexander Siloti and composition with Rubin Goldmark. She experimented with jazz and wrote several successes. It’s all as simple as that.

Personally, Miss Suesse is tall, very slender, with gray eyes and reddish hair.... [S]he has perfect pitch and can compose sitting in bed, not needing a piano. When Whiteman first got interested in her and asked for a piece for his concert in February, 1932, she did her “Concerto in Three Rhythms” in three weeks.... She’s now working on a concerto for two pianos and orchestra, and on a full-fledged symphony. She thinks she’s pretty lucky to be, so far as she knows, the only girl symphonic composer in the world."I haven’t any competition,” she says. “It’s a cinch.”

Here is that Concerto for Two Pianos, apparently not completed until 1941:

In 1942 she composed The Cocktail Suite for piano. Here is Sara Davis Buechner playing the final two movements after a brief introduction:

This 2016 piano recital in Odessa, Ukraine, includes three piano compositions by Dana Suesse:

The video includes some spoken introductions. At time 1:50 is the 110th Street Rhumba (1941); at 5:20 is the complete four-movement Cocktail Suite ("Old-Fashioned,” “Champagne,” “Bacardi,” and “Manhattan"); and at 18:45 is Evening in Harlem (1936) also known as Afternoon of a Black Faun.

Margaret Allison Bonds (1913 – 1972)

Margaret Allison Bonds was born in Chicago. Her father was a physician and civil rights activist who wrote a book entitled Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities. Her mother was a church musician who was Margaret’s first music teacher.

Beginning in high school, Margaret studied piano and composition with Florence Price and William Dawson. She later earned master’s degrees in music and composition at Northwestern University, and then studied at Juilliard. In 1933 she became to first Black person to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She met Langston Hughes in 1936 and they became close friends. Many of her songs are settings of his poetry, such as these Three Dream Portraits from 1959:

Margaret Bonds composed the Montgomery Variations for orchestra in 1964. It is a series of variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” that form snapshots of two events in the Civil Rights movement. This work was not published or performed during Margaret Bonds’ lifetime. In this world premiere performance in 2018, the conductor speaks for a few minutes about the background of the score and how it was discovered. The music begins at 4:00.

The first three variations focus on the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 – 1956:

1. Decision
2. Prayer Meeting
3. March

The final four variations concern the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham:

4. Dawn in Dixie
5. One Sunday in the South
6. Lament
7. Benediction

A video of Margaret Bond’s Spiritual Suite for piano is included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Vivian Fine (1913 – 2000)

Vivian Fine was born in Chicago. She was a piano prodigy and was awarded a scholarship at the Chicago Musical College at the age of 5. She studied composition with Ruth Crawford and wrote her first piece at the age of 13. Her 1937 composition PIece for Muted Strings (Elegiac Song) was dedicated to the children of Spain during the Spanish Civil War:

This is her Sonatina for Oboe and Piano from 1942:

In 1983 she became one of the first two women finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, but it was awarded to Ellen Zwilich.

Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915 – 1940)

Vítězslava Kaprálová was born in Brno, Austria-Hungary which is now part of the Czech Republic. Her father was a composer and her mother was a singer. She studied music in Brno, Prague, and Paris. In her 20s, she conducted the Czech Philharmonic and the BBC Orchestra. She died, probably from typhoid fever, at the age of 25.

Vítězslava Kaprálová’s published compositions are numbered up through Opus 25 and include works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, and voice. This is her two-movement piano composition Sonata Appassionata (Opus 6) from 1934.

Her April Preludes (Opus 13) dates from 1937

This is her Partita for Piano and Strings (Opus 20):

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919 – 2006)

Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya was born in Petrograd. She attended college at the Leningrad Conservatory during where she studied composition with Dmitri Shostakovich. The two composers formed an artistic relationship, commenting on and influencing each other’s works.

Despite the influence of Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya soon developed an extremely idiosyncratic style, often austere and uncompromising and informed by her religious beliefs. For these reasons, her music remained largely unperformed in the Soviet Union until the 1960s. Musicologist Alan B. Ho of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has written:

It is not difficult to imagine the disgust someone of Ustvolskaya’s temperament must have felt at having to filthy her hands with concessions to the Soviet Communist Party. Referring to her slab-like sonorities delivered with piledriving staccato attack, Dutch critic Elmer Schoenberger has called her “the lady with the hammer”. Perhaps more accurate would be “the lady with the flail”. The puritanical lashing fury of her music often suggests the image of Christ flogging the moneylenders from the temple, while several writers have remarked on the “Old Testament” vengefulness they hear in her work. There is a pounding masculinity in many of Ustvolskaya’s scores — few men, let alone women, have written music as violent as this — which bespeaks an affinity more for Jehovah than for Jesus, for the railing prophets of the Exile rather than the Gospel message of love. (Not entirely coincidentally, she dislikes having her music performed by women.)

Consequently, Ustvolskaya’s music is unlike anything else. Even something as innocently titled as Sonata for Piano No. 6 (1988) is terrifying in its stark aggressiveness:

Her Symphony No. 5, subtitled Amen, is her final work. It was composed in 1989–90 and features a man reciting the Lord’s Prayer, accompanied by violin, tuba, trumpet, oboe, and a percussion instrument constructed of wood and struck with mallets.

Julia Amanda Perry (1924 – 1979)

Julia Perry was born in Lexington, Kentucky and grew up in Akron, Ohio. She studied music at several schools, including Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood and Juilliard. She later taught in Tallahassee and Atlanta.

Julia Perry’s compositions are not widely known or performed, but she wrote several operas (including operas based on Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant), 12 symphonies, and works for choruses. She experimented with harmony and a technique she called “pantonal” that used all the notes of the octave without settling into a particular key.

This melancholy Pastoral for flute and string sextet is from 1962:

A video of Julia Perry’s Short Piece for Orchestra is included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Ruth Schonthal (1924 – 2006)

Ruth Esther Hadassah Schonthal was born in Hamburg of Jewish ancestry. She began composing at the age of 5 and started studying music in Berlin, but her family had to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s, settling in Stockholm. She continued to study piano and composition, but later travelled with her parents to various places, including Mexico City, where she performed her own piano compositions at the age of 19.

In 1946, Ruth Schonthal was able to study composition at Yale with Paul Hindemith. She married in 1950 and lived in New York City and then New Rochelle, balancing her time between composition, piano playing (including bars and clubs), and teaching. One of her students was Stephanie Germanotta (Lady Gaga).

Ruth Schonthal’s compositions include opera, works for orchestra, chamber music, and music for piano and harpsichord. This Sonata Concertante for clarinet and piano dates from 1973:

This Nachklange (“Reverberations”) was composed between 1967 and 1974 for “piano with added timbres.” This is commonly known as a “prepared piano” in which the sound is altered by various objects inserted in or sitting on top of the piano strings.

In an interview she described the origin of Nachklange:

I wrote a piece called Reverberations, which is supposed to be a portrait of Germany and what happened to it, the destruction and all, to a country with such a humanistic background. I wanted to create something with a spiritual quality that was destroyed like a bombed-out cathedral. The piano was no good for that, so I experimented and put all kinds of objects on top of the strings. Nothing was safe and I ended up with an orchestration on the strings which gave me that shattered-beauty effect that I was looking for.

Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925 – 2000)

Lucia Dlugoszewski was born in Detroit of Polish immigrants. She began studying piano at the age of 6 but decided instead to pursue studies in physics and pre-med. Around 1950 she gave all that up and moved to New York City, where she studied piano and composition. She began creating her own instruments, including a “timbre piano” where the strings are struck with various objects.

Lucia Dlugoszewski became very involved in the New York City arts scene. She married dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins (1909 – 1994) and composed music for his dance pieces. After his death, she ran the Erick Hawkins Dance Company and choreographed some dance works herself. Her obituary in the New York Times reported:

“Ms. Dlugoszewski was celebrated in New York dance for her unparalleled gift for inspiring intense affection, admiration and exasperation all at once as she exuberantly buttonholed countless company directors, choreographers, dancers and writers to involve them in her own and Hawkins’s projects. Beneath that hectic, usually disheveled exterior, however, was a poetic, gutsy composer known for her experimentation with timbre or tonal quality and color, her invention of percussion instruments and the freshness of her musical structures, in works made for the timbre piano and traditional orchestra instruments. She created, Virgil Thomson once said, “far-out music of great delicacy, originality and beauty of sound”.

Partially as a result of her unique instrumentation, Lucia Dlugoszewski’s music seems not to be often performed live these days. This video is a dance entitled Fountain in the Middle of the Room performed by Katherine Duke to choreography and music by Lucia Dlugoszewski. It uses a recording of her composition Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) Parts I and II:

Although this video is not optimum and you can hear street noises from outside, this is a rare live performance of one of Lucia Dlugoszewski’s compositions, Tender Theater Flight Nageire from 1978:

Bebe Barron (1925 – 2008)

Bebe Barron was one of the pioneers of electronic music. She and her husband Louis (1920 – 1989) composed the music for Forbidden Planet (1956), which was the first entirely electronic feature film score.

She was born Charlotte May Wind in Minneapolis. She studied piano at the University of Minnesota and composition with Roque Cordero. She continued to study composition after moving to New York City and marrying Louis Barron in 1947. He nicknamed her “Bebe.”

Louis and Bebe received a tape recorder as a wedding gift and began using it to create electronic compositions. Louis designed ring modulator circuits to generate sounds, and Bebe assembled these sounds into compositions. They began composing scores for short experimental films, and convinced producer Dory Schary to let them do sound effects for Forbidden Planet, which evolved into the creating the full score.

This is the 1952 short film Bells of Atlantis directed by Ian Hugo with Anais Nin reading excerpts from her novella “House of Incest” and also appearing in the movie. Electronic music is by Louis and Bebe Barron:

Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003)

Daphne Oram was one of the early pioneers of electronic music. She was born in Wiltshire, England, and learned piano, organ, and composition at an early age. She could have attended The Royal College of Music but decided against it in favor of a job as a junior sound engineer at the BBC. She was 17 years old.

Daphne Oram’s first few years at the BBC were during World War II, so one of her jobs was to “shadow” live music broadcasts by syncing phonograph records in case of a bombing raid; if the live performance had to be halted, the phonograph records in the studio would take over. She was also responsible for creating sound effects for the BBC, sometimes in connection with broadcast plays, and she soon began experimenting with the tape equipment, staying after hours to work on her own techniques.

In 1959, Daphne Oram left the BBC to set up her own studio. At the Oramics Studio for Electronic Composition, she developed a technology she called Oramics that created music from graphical patterns drawn on 35mm film stock. (Footage of Oramics in action can be seen in the 2020 documentary Sisters with Transistors.) Some of Daphne Oram’s sounds were included in the 1961 horror film The Innocents but she was not credited.

Bird of Parallax is a 1972 composition written for a ballet performance that combines sounds from the Oramics Machine with traditional tape montage.

Betsy Jolas (born 1926)

Betsy Jolas was born in Paris of American parents who founded an experimental literary magazine entitled “transition” that was published in Paris from 1927 to 1938. On the family’s return to the U.S. in 1940, she began studying music, and then continued in Paris in 1946, studying under Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. She later taught at Yale, Harvard, and the University of California.

Betsy Jolas has composed works in a variety of genres, almost always with French titles. She is mostly known for her solo and chamber music, which tends to involve unusual combinations of instruments and is often rather sparse with a contemplative flavor. Here is her Quartre Duos for viola and piano from 1979:

This Quatre pièces en marge for cello and piano is from 1983:

This is her “Études aperçues” for vibraphone and five cowbells from 1992

Betty Jackson King (1928 – 1994)

Betty Jackson was born in Chicago. She first started learning music from her mother and was introduced to spirituals in her father’s church. She studied composition, piano, and voice at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University and other institutions. She later taught music at the University of Chicago and other colleges and high schools, and she was the president of the National Association of Negro Musicians for 14 years.

Betty Jackson King mostly composed vocal music, including arrangement of spirituals. This is her 1955 piano composition, Four Seasonal Sketches:

Thea Musgrave (born 1928)

Thea Musgrave was born in Edinburgh. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and in her early 20s at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger. She later studied with Aaron Copland. She has lived in the United States since 1972.

Thea Musgrave has written several operas, including one on Harriet Tubman and another on Simón Bolívar. Her compositions include works for orchestra and chamber ensembles. She has sometimes incorporated electronic techniques in her music. This is Orfeo I from 1975 for flute and tape.

Narcissus for solo flute and digital delay is from 1987:

This orchestral work entitled Rainbow is from 1990:

Sofia Gubaidulina (born 1931)

Sofia Gubaidulina is perhaps the most prominent living Russian composer.

Born in Chistopol to parents of Russian and Tatar ancestry in the Tatar Republic of the USSR (now in the Republic of Tatarstan), Sofia Gubaidulina has been composing since the age of 5. She studied at the Kazan Conservatory and continued at the Moscow Conservatory. Her early compositions were unorthodox, and she was considered by her instructors be on a “mistaken path,” but she was supported by Dmitri Shostakovich, who is reputed to have told her “I want you to continue down your mistaken path.” Since 1992 she has lived in Hamburg and has used German words in the titles of her compositions.

Musically, Sofia Gubaidulina has cited Bach, Shostakovich, and Webern as her greatest influences. Her compositions are often informed by her strong religious and spiritual beliefs, which she had to keep secret during her earlier years in the USSR. She is fond of percussion, unusual instruments, and the use of extended techniques on traditional instruments, including experiments with microtonality and electronics. Numerous compositions make use of the bayan, a Russian button accordion.

A wide variety of Sofia Gubaidulina’s compositions are available on YouTube. This is her 2009 composition Fachwerk (“Framework”), a concerto for bayan, percussion, and strings that veers from the mysterious and contemplative, through sonically amazing passages, into quite an astonishing final several minutes.

This is her violin concerto Dialog: Ich und Du from 2018:

Éliane Radigue (born 1932)

Éliane Radigue is a French composer of electronic music who has recently been composing for traditional acoustic instruments. She was born in Paris and studied piano, but her growth as a composer began when she became a student of electronic-music composer Pierre Schaeffer, and later an assistant to Pierre Henry.

The early compositions of Éliane Radigue make use of microphones and tape loops. In the 1970s she began experimenting with the Buchla and Moog synthesizers, and then switched to the ARP 2500. In the mid-1970s, she took a hiatus from composing for three years to study Buddhism. Much of her focus during the latter part of the 20th century was devoted to her meditative composition Trilogie de la Mort based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which lasts nearly three hours:

In 2001, Éliane Radigue began composing works for traditional acoustic instruments but in a way that makes them sound peculiarly like electronic music. Since 2011, Éliane Radigue has been composing works in a series she calls Occam named after the 14th century friar William of Ockham (or Occam) of “Ockham’s Razor” fame, who recommended simplicity as a guiding principle.

This is her Occam Ocean XVI for solo harp, which sounds like no other harp music you’ve ever heard:

This is her Occam Ocean Hepta I for a sextet of instruments:

Pauline Oliveros (1932 – 2016)

Pauline Oliveros was a composer of electronic and experimental music who advocated for a type of holistic approach to music that she called “deep listening.”

Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston. She began performing music at an early age, and at age nine, started with the accordion, an instrument that she continued to play for the rest of her life. She attended the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and earned a BFA in composition from San Francisco State College.

In her 20s, she started experimenting with tape machines, and went on to electronic music in the 1960s. But in the 1970s, she began gravitating towards a more communal, improvisatory, and contemplative approach to music. Her work Tuning Meditation from 1971 instructs the participants to “Inhale deeply; exhale on the note of your choice; listen to the sounds around you, and match your next note to one of them; on your next breath make a note no one else is making; repeat. Call it listening out loud.” YouTube features several performances; this one was done virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic:

This performance was organized by the renowned flutist Claire Chase and Pauline Oliveros’s longtime creative partner and wife, writer Carole Ione Lewis (called Ione). An article in the New York Times describes the process.

In 1988, following an experience of improvising with other musicians in an underground cistern, Oliveros developed the concept of “deep listening” — the phrase started as a pun — which she described as the difference between hearing and listening. Here’s a TEDxIndianapolis talk where she discusses the concept:

This is one of Pauline Oliveros’s more conventional compositions. Six for a New Time was written for Sonic Youth for their 1999 album “Goodbye 20th Century (SYR 4),” which also included compositions by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, and others:

Carla Bley (born 1936)

Carla Bley is an American jazz composer and pianist. She was born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California. She was encouraged to learn piano by her father, who was a piano teacher. She moved to New York City at the age of 17, and met and married jazz pianist Paul Bley. They were later divorced but she kept the name.

Although Carla Bley plays piano and leads jazz bands, she considers herself primarily a composer, and other jazz artists have recorded her compositions.

Here is “Reactionary Tango” from Carla Bley’s 1981 album “Social Studies”, performed live.

One of her most popular compositions is Lawns, here performed by Carla Bley and Steve Swallow, her longtime collaborator and romantic partner:

Carla Bley has one of the most peculiar professional websites ever.

Delia Derbyshire (1937 – 2001)

Delia Derbyshire was an English composer of electronic music best known for her 1963 electronic realization of the Doctor Who theme composed by Ron Grainer.

Delia Ann Derbyshire was born in Conventry. She learned piano at an early age and excelled in other studies to the extent of being accepted to both Oxford and Cambridge in 1956. She went to Girton College, Cambridge to study math, but switched to music. She held several odd jobs after graduating, but in 1960 she began working as a trainee assistant studio manager at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She is one of several women composers featured in the documentary Sisters with Transistors.

At the BBC she created sounds and music for radio and television programs. Many of her early compositions (such as the Doctor Who theme) were realized with simple oscillators and edited tape. BBC rules prevented her from being credited as co-composer of the Doctor Who theme or any of the other sound effects or music she created while working there.

She continued to develop sounds and music for documentaries, pop songs, theatre productions, TV shows, films, and commercials. She stopped actively working in sound and music in 1975.

This is a short piece entitled Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO that Delia Derbyshire created for the climax of a 1967 episode of the BBC science-fiction television program Out of the Unknown. The episode was entitled “The Prophet,” adapted from the 1941 Isaac Asimov story “Reason.” The episode itself is lost.

Alice Coltrane (1937 – 2007)

Alice Coltrane was born Alice McLeod in a musical household in Detroit. Around the age of 20 she moved to Paris and studied jazz and classical music. In 1960, she married jazz vocalist Kenny Hagood, but that marriage ended in in divorce. In 1965, she married the great jazz composer and saxophonist John Coltrane.

In early 1966, Alice Coltrane replaced McCoy Tyner as pianist in John Coltrane’s band. They performed together and recorded several albums until his death in 1967. In the years following, Alice Coltrane pioneered a type of “spiritual jazz.” She spent many years associated with an ashram in California, and she integrated her Vedanta studies and Vedic ceremonies into her music. Although her early performances feature her piano playing, she also became one of the jazz world’s few harpists, and the harp figures prominently in her later work.

The mystical and spiritual overtones that might be detected in John Coltrane’s 1965 album A Love Supreme suggest a future direction for Coltrane’s music had he lived beyond 1967. But Alice Coltrane’s innovations very clearly reflect her own sensibility. This is most evident in the posthumous John Coltrane album “Infinity” from 1972. This album consists of tracks that John Coltrane recorded prior to his death, but on top of which Alice Coltrane has layered strings, organ, harp, and alternative percussion, making them very different compositions.

Alice Coltrane’s own album “World Galaxy” (also from 1972) shows a similar sensibility. It includes reinterpretations of two of John Coltrane’s signature works and three new pieces. This album is very early-70s, right down to the cover by psychedelic artist Peter Max. I’ve selected the middle of the five tracks called “Galaxy in Turiya,” which would not ordinarily be classified as jazz.

Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009)

Maryanne Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania. She studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and composition with George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania. She also studied in Europe, and privately studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Maryanne Amacher is primarily known for her electronic sound installations, often involving filling multiple rooms of a location with sound. In the 1970s, she collaborated with John Cage and composed scores for Merce Cunningham.

Her City Links series began in 1967. Sounds from various locations within a city would be transmitted over telephone lines and mixed together, often then broadcast live over the radio. The first in the series combined sounds from five locations in Buffalo into a 28-hour live radio broadcast. The City Links series continued into the 1990s, eventually numbering 22 installations, and sometimes involved multiple cities. She was quoted in her New York Times obituary: “I was particularly interested in the experience of ‘Synchronicity,’ hearing spaces distant from each other at the same time, which we do not experience in our lives.”

Amacher composed Petra for two pianos in 1991:

The liner notes for the recording describe the work like this:

Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.

Joan Tower (born 1938)

Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York, but her family moved to Bolivia when she was nine. Her father (a mineralogist) insisted that she get a good music education. After moving back to the United States, she studied at Bennington and then Columbia University, and received her doctorate in 1968.

Joan Tower is one of the most beloved of living American composers. Concert audiences love her bold and dramatic orchestral music, which is frequently performed by American orchestras.

In something of a response to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, in 1986 Joan Tower composed Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. She has since followed it with five other compositions of the same name that together form a 25-minute suite.

Joan Tower’s chamber music tends to be more challenging. Here is her 2005 composition DNA for percussion quartet:

In 2004, Joan Tower composed an orchestral work entitled Made in America that uses fragments of “America the Beautiful” as a recurring motif. It was commissioned specifically for performance by small and amateur orchestras, and it was performed in every state between 2005 and 2007.

Here is Made in America performed by young musicians in Round Top, Texas.

Gloria Coates (born 1938)

Gloria Coates was born in Wausau, Wisconsin. Some of her earliest musical experiences involve singing at rallies for her politician father.

In her compositions, Gloria Coates usually restricts herself to a limited palette of timbres and materials. Her music is minimalist, yet it tends to be structured in canons rather than repetitive figures. She is quite fond of string glissandi and sometimes uses quarter tones. Her music often moves slowly but achieves an eerie beauty.

Gloria Coates has lived in Munich since 1969, and her music tends to be performed more in Europe than the United States. Among a variety of orchestral and chamber works that she has composed are 16 symphonies and 10 string quartets. Most of her symphonies and string quartets have been recorded and some are available on YouTube, but live performances on YouTube are much rarer.

Here is the third (and final) movement of her String Quartet No. 5 from 1988, entitled In the Fifth Dimension, but it’s worthwhile checking out the entire work.

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To continue chronologically, go to Yet Another Month of Women Composers.