1 - Historical Women Composers and the Transience of Female Musical Fame

Summary

Amidst debates of the early 1880s about the status of women in music, the English organist and scholar Stephen S. Stratton delivered a self-avowed ‘polemical’ paper at the 7 May 1883 meeting of the Musical Association.¹ Entitled ‘Woman in Relation to Musical Art’, the talk included a list of women composers ‘drawn from many sources’ and compiled, he said, ‘as evidence that women have been engaged in composition for a longer period of time, and in more branches of the art, than is generally supposed’. Stratton’s ‘list’ consists in 389 names of mostly verifiable historical women dating back to the trobairitz Beatrix, Countess of Dia (twelfth century), each annotated with an approximate date of birth and the genres in which they had composed.² Where Stratton unearthed this remarkable trove of information he does not say, although as co-author of the then forthcoming British Musical Biography (1897), he may well have been culling pre-existing reference works for information.³