Women Composers

The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works. Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples.

The idea of the title is that women have long been viewed as the inspiration to men's artistic creation, while women's creative works themselves have been overlooked. This volume draws together essays by musicologists, ethnographers, classicists, and historians to explore female musical activity in

With newly recovered information about women composers as well as an updated listing of available scores and recordings, this edition brings together musical and biographical material about 25 composers from the 11th to the 20th centuries; discusses each composer in context and analyzes the conditions required for women to compose and for their works to survive.

This classic anthology combines source readings with interpretive essays and personal portraits to illuminate the rich yet neglected history of women in music.