Women composers

Consult this section to discover catalogues and search tools for locating repertoire by women composers put forth by music publishers and vendors.

This guide does not endorse any of the following publishers or vendors. The resources listed here are included because they provide pertinent information about selected works and composers.

• Daniel’s Orchestral Music Online
  • Orchestral music finder tool: provides information about thousands of works
  • Advanced search options filter by composer’s nationality, ethnicity, and gender
  • Provides links to online perusals scores, program notes, and recordings
• Boosey & Hawkes
  • From operas to orchestral and chamber works that span 125 years of classical music
  • Peruse scores, discover instrumentation and duration
  • Watch and listen to excerpts of interviews with composers and their works
• The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection
  • Standard repertoire and many rare and out-of-print works
  • 19th- and 20th-century American music
  • The catalogue lists names, dates, and nationalities of composers, instrumentation, and titles of complete, incomplete, and uncirculated sets held by the collection
• Furore
  • More than 100 works for orchestra by women composers
  • 2,000 compositions from various epochs by 170 women from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia
• Hildegard Publishing Company
  • Discover composers by historical period: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern
  • Search and browse by title, instrument, or composer
  • Listen to examples from their catalogue: vocal, choral, piano, instrumental
• Kassian Choral Series
  • Series highlights women composers of choral music (original compositions and arrangements)
• Ladyslipper Music
  • Annotated print catalogues since 1976
  • Retail Print Catalog Collection: features 52 herstory documents spanning 30 years, with over 100,000 annotations of recordings
  • Online Catalog Archive: artist discographies
• Oxford University Press
  • Orchestra, opera chamber, solo and chamber works and choral music catalogue
• Présence Compositrices
  • List of publishers with their specific descriptions and websites 
• Svensk Musik
  • Swedish vendor
  • More than 7,200 titles by female composers
  • Filter by language, instrumentation, duration, composition year and genre
• Theodore Front
  • Includes catalogues of works by women composers
• Wise Music
  • Downloadable catalogue of works by women composers
• Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy
  • Non-profit organization advocating for the performance and place of women composers
  • Access to free perusal scores of Amy Beach

See our blog post about locating online scores. The blog post includes a link to a video tutorial demonstrating how to access online perusal scores through certain music vendor websites. 

• McGill users only
• Open access resource
• Free resource
• In-library use
• Catalogue record