And let us not be forgetting Maryanne Amacher, Diamanda Galas, Adriana Hölszky, Joan La Barbara, Daphne Oram, Karin Rehnqvist, Kaija Saariaho, though none of them (except possbly the last-named) could be described as "romantic".

... and, if I may say so, mentioned in my post not a quarter of an hour ago.

Mind you I think her more recent work is seriously cloying in comparison with what she was doing 15-20 years ago.

We're just supplying lists of names which isn't that helpful! - and I was the first to be guilty. We can do better than that, can't we? Let's have a couple of sentences per composer named, shall we? Here's mine.

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) yes, died very young unfortunately: very much in the post-romantic mould. Some ravishingly emotional stuff and harmonically sophisticated. There's an old recording on EMI which although very dry in sound has some good performances of some of the later, more individual works conducted by Igor Markevitch, namely the large-scale psalm "Du fond de l'abime" as well as Psalms 24 + 129, Vielle priere buddhique and her last work, Pie Jesu (a real corker).

Ruth Crawford (1901-53). Seeger is usually (erroneously) added to her name: She married composer/musicologist Charles Seeger and was mother/stepmother to Peggy + Pete. One of the still underrated American composers of the radical modernist tendency (dissonant and structurally worth studying in her case) in the 1920s after Ives and alongside Ruggles, Cowell, Rudhyar etc. There's a CD containing some of the most remarkable pieces on Deutsche Grammophon conducted by Oliver Knussen which includes the famous String Quartet 1931, 3 songs for contralto + ensemble (Rat riddles, Prayers of steel, In tall grass)  and a brief Study in mixed accents for piano.

Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatte (1899-1974). Born Moscow + lived in various European countries and the last c.20 years of her life in Canada. Composed in different tonal but not conservative styles. Still pretty unknown it seems. Most available and recommended is Marc-Andre Hamelin's double CD on Altarus of 6 multi-movement piano sonatas - 1-4 from the 1920s, 5 + 6 from the 50s. Was herself an excellent violinist and pianist - Stokowski engaged her to play concertos on both instruments in the same concert. Wrote much for both violin and piano including the only Concerto I know of for solo unaccompanied violin.

Carla Bley (b 1938). Jazz composer + keyboard player. Probably doesn't need much introduction though it might be worth mentioning that the type of improvisation featured (at least) in small group recordings of c.20 years ago tended towards the genuinely melodic and away from the more annoying widdly many-notes-to-the-second. Individual choices of CD are difficult here, but I'd mention European Tour 1977 and Musique Mecanique, or if you like your jazz a little less hard-edged, Night-Glo and Sextet.

Reiner, I'm very dubious about Jocelyn Pook, both the quality of her music and her working methods. A colleague once described these latter to me, in response to which I asked the question "Is she a composer?". The colleague (who as a person is a model of politeness and diplomacy) hesitated for a few seconds and then gave the answer "No".

Ah, so many that I omitted to mention as I was in too much of a hurry! - especially Gramatté, Bacewicz and Musgrave (the last of whom will soon be 80, as her slightly elder compatriot Ronald Stevenson will be tomorrow). No one seems yet to have mentioned Dorothy Gow, a pupil of both RVW and Wellesz, who is credited with being one of the first British composers to respond to the music of the Second Viennese School...

One of my favourite baroque composers is Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729).  A precociously talented keyboard player, she won the patronage of Louis XIV while still a child, was the first woman to publish works for solo harpsichord, wrote consistently good cantatas both secular and sacred - and wrote some fantastic violin sonatas that fuse Italianate virtuosity with French style.

Here she is:

That made me laugh! But give me the Carla Bley option for that situation!


That sounds quite appetising!

There's a thread elsewhere for this kind of discussion and I submit that it is well-nigh impossible to identify with certainty that any music was written or improvised by a female composer on aural evidence alone. Unless I'm misunderstanding something quite fundamental, I think that the principal purposes of this thread are to highlight the existence of the music of women composers, to invite views about it as such and to alert people to music of which they might previously have been unaware.