ABSTRACT
During a long career in university teaching and research, I introduced for the first time, in the early 1990s, courses on Studies in Women Composers at the University of Oxford Faculty of Music, which remained a regular feature of the syllabus. My chapter takes stock of developments in teaching and studying women composers, tracing the growth of the subject from the early stages through to the present – partly from a personal perspective – and reflecting more generally on the issues and motives that drive our efforts to bring women composers into the foreground. The chapter title is inspired by Marcia Citron’s reflections in the early 2000s on the continuing need to do this work. More recently, the response of the chief examiner to the school student who pointed out the absence of women from the A-level anthology of music she was studying – to the effect that he considered no women had contributed significantly to Western music or any other – suggests that it is still imperative to continue these efforts. Reviewing a major encyclopaedia of music that has recently been put online, and that is subject to an ongoing programme of updating for articles transferred from the print version (Wollenberg 2019), I note that there is scope for more inclusivity regarding the contribution of women composers across broad areas: genres, forms, style categories and places, for example. Perception of the paucity of their representation in some of the as yet updated articles in such areas as these, serves to highlight both the gratifying extent to which awareness of women’s contribution has increased, and the need to repair past injustice.
