A new book on music history examines why the industry was dismissive of female composers

Do not believe…that the artistic career is more accessible to my sex. This is a grave error. The steps are infinitely more difficult, and the good fellowship, which helps so many artists, is in a way shut out from a woman who has the good – or the ill – luck to be born a musician!

The women from history whose music we hear today were often the daughters of musicians, receiving training from childhood and having little social status to lose. Francesca Caccini (1587– 1640) was the daughter of the composer Giulio Caccini; Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677) the adopted (and probably biological) daughter of the Venetian poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi. Both women were singers as well as composers. The French composer and harpsichordist Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) was born into a family of harpsichord makers; Harriet Wainwright (c. 1766–1843) came from generations of English church organists, although she herself was a singer as well as a composer. Louise Farrenc (1804–1875) was the daughter not of a musician, but of a sculptor; Clara Schumann (1819–1896) had pianists as parents, and her mother was also a singer. Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), whose father was a tenor, and who herself became one of…

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