The 10 best female composers of all time

It probably goes without saying that the world of music - like the wider society that it has always been part of - has been a world commanded by men. The role of classical composer in particular was long considered an especially masculine endeavour, one of the very highest of art forms to which the ‘fairer sex’ was unsuited.

For that reason, all the more remarkable are the achievements of composers who overcame this profound, far-reaching discrimination. Many composers of course still grapple with it, even if the playing field is gradually levelling after centuries of great work done by great women - in music and beyond. This work has persistently undermined such sexism, and forced the world to recognise women’s equal capabilities.

Accordingly, it's great music written by great women we celebrate here, in the last of the blog’s ‘best composers’ series. 

Despite that bias - and partly because of it - the first article in that series (on the best classical composers) is bookended by two exceptional women: Hildegard von Bingen and Kaija Saariaho. If they made the classical list, surely they can’t be overlooked here. Once again they take up the first and final positions, and the same entries are used.  
 

List of the best female music composers
 

• Hildegard von Bingen
• Clara Schumann
• Joni Mitchell
• Florence Price
• Barbara Strozzi
• Nadia Boulanger
• Sofia Gubaidulina
• Carole King
• Unsuk Chin
• Kaija Saariaho

Hildegard von Bingen

Classical music has been, for the vast majority of its history, a world dominated by men. It still is of course, though momentous and encouraging changes are well underway. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that from the farthest reaches of the tradition that we can call ‘classical music’, it is a woman’s voice that connects to us. From nearly a millennium ago, Hildegard of Bingen offers modern ears some of the most pioneering and expressive music of the first centuries of the story of classical music.

Middle Age Europe in general was an enormous boys’ club. Males prevailed in all aspects of life, and together worked to perpetuate their own dominance. A bastion of that society was of course the all-powerful Latin Church, which happens to be not only the very home of the tradition we’re exploring, but also an area where women were far more empowered than you might expect. 

In convents scattered across Europe, well-respected communities of nuns studied, wrote, prayed, and served God. As the abbess of two such convents in the German Rhineland, Hildegard would rise to become one of the most revered scholars in Europe. 

Composer, playwright, theologian, philosopher, healer, saint. She was a quite extraordinary individual. Her musical output, consisting of 69 compositions - each with its own original poetic text - is one of the largest surviving medieval repertoires. Composed circa 1151, her morality play Ordo Virtutum ranks among the most monumental achievements of the era.

Her music is entirely monophonic, featuring a lone melodic line like all plainsong of the period - Gregorian chant or otherwise - but it’s distinguished by constructive adventurousness and emotive power. Her use of elaborate melisma is another hallmark, which reflects an unusually close correspondence between music and text. In this regard her work anticipates the innovations that her later medieval and Renaissance successors would soon carry out.

Clara Schumann

A mainstay of the discourse on great women composers, Clara Schumann stands as one of the finest examples of a woman overcoming the enlarged obstacles faced by all of her gender to achieve musical greatness. The composers explored here are all bound by this accomplishment, but the scale of Schumann’s challenge, and the status that she acquired in rising to it, are quite exceptional. She was widely celebrated during her lifetime, if more as a pianist than a composer, and her legacy has only grown further in recent years as her feats have come to be fully recognised.

Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in Leipzig, a German city of rich musical heritage, as the workplace of Bach and birthplace of Wagner. Her parents were pianists and piano teachers, and thanks to early intense tuition from her father in particular (echoes of Amadeus and Leopold Mozart begin to resound), she was a virtuoso by nine, at which age she gave her official debut. She toured the great cities of Europe as a child prodigy, giving concerts to rapturous receptions that offer a glimpse at her truly incredible talent: ‘The appearance of this artist can be regarded as epoch-making’, wrote one particularly enthusiastic critic. 

The classical-music community of 19th-century Germany was a fiercely competitive and meritocratic environment. In this period the idea of a ‘pantheon’ of great composers (who were intially mostly Austro-German) was beginning to emerge. That a young, female musician was able to elicit the praise that she did speaks volumes as to the scale of her ability.

During these years she would also perform her own compositions, demonstrating her total mastery of creation and performance. Her towering - and only complete - piano concerto, finished just days before her sixteenth birthday, is exemplary of her extraordinarily mature handling of the contemporary Romantic idioms and, of course, the art of pianistic writing. Lieder and a small output of orchestral works and chamber music would follow, but her focus was always piano solo, and she composed one of the era's richest bodies of work for the instrument.  

Unfortunately her compositional activity dwindled after her marriage to Robert Schumann, though she continued to perform frequently and was an important interpreter of his music and that of her lifelong friend Brahms. While her marriage was by all accounts a happy and loving one until Robert’s health began to deteriorate, it hindered her in many ways, a fate that she was neither the first nor the last wife to endure. Not only did she compose less but she would also become overshadowed as a creator and cease writing entirely after his untimely death. Nonetheless in recent years her legacy has been championed by a growing number of musicians and musicologists, and her phenomenal work is finally winning the status it deserves.

Joni Mitchell

When Joni Mitchell’s chapter in music history began, the world was a very different place. This wasn’t Germany in the 19th century but the US in the 1960s, a time during which an unprecedented amount of socio-cultural change occurred: the Space Race, television, the civil rights movement, Flower Power and the Vietnam War. Gender parity was a far more visible objective, even if women continued to fight the uphill battle. 

As far as music is concerned, while musicians like an Etta James or a Dusty Springfield were revered as vocalists, few were taken seriously as artists in a broader sense, let alone as composers of music - the same performative bias that plagued Clara Schumann long before.

Joni Mitchell changed that, however, as a musician who wrote as well as sang her songs, and who, as it soon became clear, would never stop dancing to the beat of her own drum. After several years of gigging and honing her songwriting craft in the mid-1960s - first in her native Canada and then in the US - Mitchell's debut studio album Song to a Seagull was released in 1968. It was an instant success, other artists began to cover her songs and she was swiftly appropriated by the American folk scene that had influenced her style to date. Her album of 1971, Blue, is the high-water mark of this early work of hers - recently voted by Rolling Stone magazine as the third-greatest album of all time. 

You can imagine the sense of betrayal her fans felt, therefore, when their folk sweetheart began exploring new territory. Strains of jazz appeared on The Hissing of Summer Lawns in 1975 and on her next album, Hejira (1976). She undertook a deep engagement with that genre, integrating its sensibilities with her distinctive songwriting style. Arguably her most impressive compositional abilities manifested at this point, when her naturally florid vocal delivery and liberal rhythmic handling was enriched by jazz's vivid harmonies and intricate textures. Take ‘Blue Motel Room’ from Hejira, for instance, a tune that Thelonious Monk would have been proud of. It’s little surprise, then, that the titanic jazz composer Charles Mingus agreed to collaborate with Mitchell soon after these albums were released. Their work appeared on the 1979 album Mingus, released by Mitchell, after the great man’s death.  

Ever the butterfly, she displayed an ability to self-reinvent, a resistance to being pigeon-holed that came to define her artistry and consistently defy the expectations imposed on her by the music industry. But Mitchell's essential and foundational skill as a songwriting composer deserves its due, too - a consummate skill in marrying words and music that rivals those of Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Cole Porter, and the rest of the icons of that great art. From the eternal themes of change on ‘River’ to the nostalgic lyricism of ‘Both Sides Now’, Mitchell can tell any kind of tale in music in the most profoundly beautiful way. 

Allmusic’s own assessment is conclusive: ‘When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century’.

Florence Price

The disadvantages that beset Florence Price were twofold: she was both a woman and an African American. It simply wasn’t feasible for such a person to excel within the American classical-music circles that remained fixated on white male Europeans, and existed in a society continuing to suffer the racist legacy of enslavement. These handicaps would always prevent her from attaining the recognition she deserved, but not from achieving remarkable things, nor from writing majestic music. Her accomplishments in the face of such challenges speak for the inestimable wealth of her talent.

Price was born into a mixed-race Arkansas family in 1887. Under the guiding hand of her mother, a music teacher, she learned piano and composition as a girl and later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. After returning to her Arkansas home for nearly 20 years, Price and her family uprooted to Chicago having borne witness to racially motivated atrocities at home. Enveloped and inspired by the city’s thriving Black culture, she found her creativity reignited, and went on to write the majority of her 300-or-so compositions in the next 25 years - before dying at the age of 66 in 1953 - and becoming a pivotal figure in the Chicago Black Renaissance.

Price’s classical music is naturally reflective of the European Romantic tradition on which her education was grounded, and which underpinned early-20th-century American music per se. But her work is also hugely distinguished by the traditional music of African Americans, an influence that runs like a thread throughout her compositions - and constitutes a further example of folk-music interaction among these ten composers. 

On top of being one of her best pieces, Price’s Symphony No. 1 typifies this aspect of her musicianship, with overtones of spiritual tunes audible in its warm, pensive polyphony, and distinctive use of percussion in the first movement. In a knowing take on the dance roots of symphonic third movements, she also composes a juba (a type of African-American dance) in that slot - and not for the last time in her symphonic output. 

That piece is also symbolic of her greatest achievement as a composer: being the first African-American woman to have work performed by a major US orchestra. Said performance of the symphony was given in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Frederick Stock, long a great champion of Price’s music. Despite such cherished successes, she never heard most of her works performed, and her music received far less than the attention it merited in her lifetime. Yet the 2009 discovery of numerous scores in her dilapidated summer home triggered a resurgence of interest in her work, which has brought her tremendous work back into the spotlight.

Barbara Strozzi

Much of what has already been written about talent and originality overcoming inequality and prejudice can be said no less emphatically of Italian Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi. What really makes her music stand out from the crowd is her astonishing productivity, especially given her personal circumstances. Publishing eight volumes of her own music, Strozzi could boast that she had more secular music in print than any contemporary composer in southern Europe, and she achieved this in the absence of patronage from either Church or aristocracy - the two main sources of monetary support for musicians of the era.

A native of Venice, Strozzi was the illegitimate daughter of Giulio Strozzi, a leading figure among the Venetian cultural elite, through whose house the young Barbara saw numerous artists and intellectuals come and go. She acquired an impressive regional reputation as a singer in her early career, but increasingly incorporated composition into her practice as the years passed. In spite of her renown as a performer, however, she always struggled to raise the kind of awareness of her music that might have led to serious financial assistance. Here we can observe a familiar bias playing out: women being admired for their skill as performers, but overlooked as practitioners of the ‘unfeminine’ art of composition.  

And as with Schumann and her piano, so Strozzi’s abundant works centralised the voice in songs both sacred and (mostly) secular. These are pieces composed with a stunning degree of imagination, with a sense of theatricality reminiscent of the new and exciting medium of opera that was beginning to grip musicians across the Italian peninsula in the middle phase of the 1600s. Take the introduction to the first song from her opus one of 1644, the first book of madrigals. The animated voices rise like a whirlwind, before settling calmly down into the most serenely lyrical texture, in which each statement is carefully and clearly articulated with purpose and patience. 

Strozzi’s skill, prolificacy and total mastery of the art of vocal music extends a lineage that can be traced back to the Middle Ages, and which we explored in the countdown of the best composers from that period. Like the French troubadours centuries before her, she was not merely a writer of musc but a poet–composer–performer, a complete all-round artist and master of songcraft. Such an approach was a rarity by Strozzi’s lifetime, as composers gradually became more musically specalised. This positions her as a highly individual and rather leftfield artist in the historical development of music. 

Nadia Boulanger

Philip Glass, Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, Daniel Barenboim, Ástor Piazzolla, John Eliot Gardiner, Burt Bacharach - this already-too-long list winds on. But what is it that these men have in common? They, and their works which have proliferated so widely in global culture, owe an immeasurable debt to the compositional nous of a remarkable woman. 

That woman is Nadia Boulanger, unquestionably a candidate - probably the candidate for the title of history’s greatest composition teacher. As the variety of the names above indicates, for decades her compositional tutelage was the most coveted in the world. Musicians from all countries pilgrimaged to Paris, France for the privilege of obtaining her legendary insight on their work. Copland’s assessment of her ability to appraise a composition says it all: she ‘could always find the weak spot in a place you suspected was weak ... She also could tell you why it was weak’. 

Adapting to the needs, skill, desire and personality of every student, her teaching method fundamentally centred on identifying an individual’s unique creative voice - no matter the style they practised - and nurturing the authentic, deliberate and consistent expression of that voice. Only through such a flexible approach could she teach students as dissimilar as Glass and Jones, Bacharach and Gardiner. 

In this capacity she arguably shaped the sound of the 20th century more impactfully than any other person. But her inclusion on this list not of teachers but of creators is reinforced by her own compositional abilities, which have been thoroughly eclipsed by her achievements as an educator. Giving up composing at the age of 35 in 1922, she wrote relatively little music, but this is a textbook case of quality over quantity. Grounded in the Impressionist idiom that defined French music in the early decades of the 20th century, her music exhibits the total technical proficiency that you’d expect from such a prestige tutor, but also an extraordinary sense of coherence, with the most careful attention always paid to what she described as the grande ligne - the ‘long line’. 

In spite of honours she received composing as a student - including first prize in a number of competitions - she gave up, for the belief that she had no talent. To her teacher, a protesting Gabriel Fauré, she said: ‘If there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that I wrote useless music’. 

Nadia’s sister Lili Boulanger, who tragically died at the age of just 24, was also a tremendously gifted composer, the first woman to win the coveted Prix de Rome prize for composition. Read our analysis of her cantata Faust et Hélène in the article on the best pieces for orchestra.

Sofia Gubaidulina

The music of Sofia Gubaidulina is distinguished for its sheer excellence, depth, vision and singularity. Her vast body of work is one of almost unparalleled sophistication, marked by impeccable technique and a profound complexity of sound and structure that is scarcely matched even by the work of her most radical mid-20th-century contemporaries. 

A Russian–Tatar who spent most of her life in the quite exceptional social circumstances of Soviet Russia, Gubaidulina was one of countless artists - Dmitri Shostakovich being the most famous - whose creative expression was restricted by the country’s totalitarian apparatus. Between a lack of access to contemporary Western scores at Kazan Conservatory, to being compelled to adhere to doctrines of social realism (the aesthetic endorsed by the regime, which prohibited the use of idioms considered too ‘progressive’), for a composer who was a fervent Modernist at heart, this was an ongoing battle. 

Of course Gubaidulina’s gender also didn’t help, with party propaganda prescribing a very different role for women than the one that she envisaged for herself - compatriot Galina Ustvolskaya would also find her career held back by the attitudes this fomented. Gubaidulina was marked out as irresponsible by her seniors at the conservatory in response to her use of alternate tunings, but Shostakovich championed her music, persuading her to continue on the path that she pursued. 

Subsequently, she carefully struck the balance between authentic self-expression on the one hand and eluding condemnation, even censorship from the authorities on the other. Like other radical composers (such as Alfred Schnittke), she found refuge in film music, a medium in which Modernist idioms didn't appear to be a problem for the censors.  

Accessibility was never Gubaidulina’s bag. She relentlessly looked to expand possibilities, to push form, colour and technique to their limits and beyond, and this has long been underpinned by a devout Orthodox Christian faith. For the composer, music has always offered a means of pious spiritual practice, a sanctuary through which the reality of Soviet life could be transcended. In Rejoice!, for instance, a sonata for violin and cello, she utilised harmonic overtones as a way of resonating with other planes of existence, and in many works intervallic relationships are centralised in order to create a sense of space to function as a gateway to the divine. Her beliefs have encouraged her to cast aside tonal and structural contrivances, in the pursuit of something more mystical and cosmic.

As one of several artists lionised in the West by violin virtuoso Gidon Kremer, Gubaidulina enjoyed international recognition in the 1980s, and has been widely regarded as one of the world’s finest composers ever since. She moved to Hamburg, Germany, in 1992, home of her primary publisher Sikorski.

Carole King

Throughout the history of the popular-music industry, many of its most iconic stars have won fame and admiration primarily for their abilities as performers, as showpeople and singers: Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Rihanna - and as we mentioned, Etta James and Dusty Springfield. Supporting these icons are their record labels, who employ songwriters to compose the material the stars sing, or arrange for pre-existing classics to be covered.

Many moons ago, Carole King was such a songwriter. In fact she was one of the industry’s finest for a long time, writing (as Carole Goffin) as one half of a songwriting team with her then-husband and lyricist Gerry. Selling hits to a variety of labels, they wrote some of the biggest songs of the era, many of which became standards: ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ for the Shirelles in 1961, ‘Goin' Back’ for Springfield in 1966 and ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ for Aretha Franklin in 1967. The partnership fizzled out upon the couple’s divorce in 1968. 

As tough a time as that was for King, the separation proved to be a personal catalyst as her songwriting and recording careers soon collided. She’d been trying to make a name for herself as a performer for years, and in 1970 she seized the chance to record her debut album as a solo artist, Writer, featuring mostly original material. Then came the breakthrough, Tapestry. The 1971 album, which included many of her biggest hits from the previous decade, shot her to superstardom, lastingly securing her reputation, and remaining the finest testament to her incredible faculties as a composer. Now performed by its author, her music sounded as it never had before. 

Even Mitchell, one of the finest songwriters the world has ever known, can’t match King’s raw ability to construct a succinct and unforgettably catchy pop hook - it’s a skill that has always been looked down on by the compositional elite, but it really is a very difficult thing to do. Twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - first as a songwriter and secondly as a performer - King was paid the ultimate homage in 2013 in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Few musicians receive that particular honour.

Unsuk Chin

On 22 December last year, the blog published one of its first articles, compiling the most difficult piano pieces ever composed. It wasn’t easy to select only ten, but there was no chance that Unsuk Chin’s second piano etude, ‘Sequenzen’ wouldn’t feature. The piece is absolutely typical of the searing intensity of her music that makes it impossible to ignore. 

Teaching herself piano and music theory as a child, Chin went on to study composition at Seoul National University at the turn of the 1980s. With her graduation piece, Spektra, she won a 1985 composition competition held by the Gaudeamus Foundation in Amsterdam, and that same year received a scholarship to continue her studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. There she was mentored by one of the most iconic figures of 20th-century music, György Ligeti. A great pioneer of electronic music, he would steer his student into just that field. At the Electronic Music Studio at Berlin's Technical University, Chin’s compositional maturity then began in earnest, and in the next ten years she would realise a series of works at the institution. 

Her real breakthrough was the 1993 piece Acrostic-Wordplay, comprising seven scenes from fairy-tales scored for soprano and ensemble. This is a composition in which many of the traits that came to be definitive of Chin’s musicality are in evidence. There’s the thematic lightheartedness that resurfaced in the 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland, as well as the penchant for textual gimmicks - like palindromes and anagrams - that marks a range of her vocal works. Her application of medieval musical devices such as isorhythms and crab canons forms a musical counterpart to this fascination with verbal artifice.

Of course there’s also the tendency towards powerful, virtuosic and radical experiments in sound and form. These characteristics come into their own in less programmatic works for instrumental combinations - concerti like Spira (2019) and the acclaimed first for violin (2001), or the string of six piano etudes (1995–2003), the second of which is the daunting ‘Sequenzen’. Few have been able to really pin down the overriding musical characteristics of her work, however, which is influenced by artists as diverse as Guillaume de Machaut and Iannis Xenakis, which incorporates styles as disparate as serialism and gamelan, and which makes intertextual reference to literature as wide-ranging as Homer’s epics and Samuel Beckett’s theatre.

Speaking of hardest piano pieces, another on that list was Ballade, by none other than…

Kaija Saariaho

Saariaho’s entry is taken from the Best classical composers article - if she’s good enough to make that, then she certainly deserves her spot here. To explain references to Hildegard von Bingen and Stravinsky, those two occupy the first and penultimate slots respectively, and the article concludes, as this one does, with Saariaho. 

Kaija Saariaho was nineteen when Stravinsky died, deep in the process of honing her own compositional craft. Progressing through the Sibelius Academy in her native Helsinki, and then the conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, she grew frustrated with the serialist method that Stravinsky had until recently practised, and which remained à la mode in this period among the elite European composers. Striving to find that unique voice and creative style  that one day would be so distinctive of her art, the breakthrough came in 1980.  

That year she discovered the music of the French spectral composers, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, who were discarding conventional notation by using sound’s raw acoustic properties as a basis for composing. Inspired by their work, Saariaho began to experiment with computer assisted composition, questioning the very practice of writing music itself. And so she followed in Cage and Nono’s footsteps on the postmodern path, and became one of the most important electronic-music innovators since Schaeffer and Stockhausen. 

Then came her masterpieces. She drew electronics into orchestral textures, engineering vast and overwhelming soundscapes that listeners will struggle to rationalise. At the other end of the spectrum, in chamber and solo repertoire, she scales new heights of intricacy and virtuosity through dense polyphonic constructions. 

850 years on from Hildegard von Bingen, going into the 21st century, Saariaho stands as the greatest living composer - at least if this 2019 composers’ poll by BBC Music Magazine is anything to go by. 

We come full circle by ending as we started - with the achievements of a woman composer. Such were the obstacles that held countless women back in the intervening period, few were in a position to rise to the profile of a Monteverdi or a Beethoven, to build a platform from which their music could proliferate, influence, be historic and achieve what we all normally think of as ‘greatness’. We celebrate a selection of these women who had all the ability, but none of the opportunity, in the countdown of female composers.

Access sheet music from your favourite female music composers
 

Yes, that article referenced in the inaugural ‘best composers’ post is the same one you’ve just finished reading, which appropriately draws this series to a close.

As ever, remember that the music of all these remarkable women and of countless others - Fanny Mendelssohn, Ethel Smyth, Cécile Chaminade, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Francesca Caccini (her landmark opera La liberazione di Ruggiero is highly recommended) - can be discovered on the nkoda app. Play, sing, study, pick up your pencil and compose. Whatever your practice, let nkoda enhance it, and help make you a better musician.  

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