ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Stirling, like many of her female musical colleagues, earned her reputation writing vocal music that Victorian society considered appropriate for her sex — short secular pieces for soloist or chorus. Stirling was apparently one of few female organists in nineteenth-century England who composed vocal music. An examination of her music suggests that she was a talented composer who wrote eminently sing able pieces but lacked the great gifts of composers whose works remain in the choral repertoire. Although prescriptions for women composers applied to instrumental as well as vocal music, in her organ music Stirling was less confined to the feminine forms of composition assigned to women. Stirling and her female organist colleagues were not exempt from societal expectations for women composers. As had been implied by correspondents and writers, male and female, women encountered a number of constraints that limited the positive reception of their compositions.
