There is a lot of interest at the moment in women composers. Until recently, women were a small minority of the composing population, but in working with large datasets, I encounter a surprisingly large number of female names (although it is often frustratingly difficult to find out any details about them). In the nineteenth century, for example, perhaps 1-2% of published music was written by women.1 Whilst that is an embarrassingly small proportion, it still equates to a substantial body of music by many hundreds of women composers – most of whom have since sunk into obscurity. There are of course many more from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.2 Continue reading →
There is a shocking absence of statistics in books on music history. Generations of music historians have shown little interest in using statistical analysis to quantify their subject.
This website is about how to use statistical techniques to study music history. It is based on my PhD thesis, and on more recent work developing the techniques, investigating various topics in music history, and discovering new datasets and ways of understanding them.