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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 →