Advancing the Music of Women Composers

The NATS Advocacy Committee, with the support of the NSA Committee and NATS leadership, is supporting an endeavor to promote diversity in repertoire selection by choosing a different theme biennially. Our first initiative is music by women composers. We want to encourage the membership to program music by women for the competition and recital seasons.

Our goal is to advance the repertoire of these composers by strong suggestion rather than by requirement. To that end we want to offer the following resources. This list is far from exhaustive, but should help you in your quest to find new repertoire. Please join us in making this an opportunity to discover, learn, and teach wonderful new repertoire that celebrates the contributions of women composers to our rich song heritage.

Online resources

The Institute for Composer Diversity database can be searched by filtering for women composers and vocal music. This search will send you to a list of composer names and their website links. https://www.composerdiversity.com/composer-diversity-database

Song Helix has a database that can also search with a variety of filters. While the list for female composers is not huge, the composer names found there can lead you to search for their websites. http://www.songhelix.com/

Hildegard Publishing Company, Voice Teacher’s Guide to Women Composers, shows publications of songs by women. https://www.hildegard.com/resources.php?page=vocal

Song by Female Composers, The Art Song Project. Here you can listen to songs by women free of charge. https://theartsongproject.com/category/songs/female-composers/

Classical Vocal Reprints: Website for printed music Website for PDF music ClarNan Editions