March was Women’s History Month and TSPR and the WIU School of Music shined the spotlight on over twenty great female composers.A big thank you goes out to the WIU School of Music staff and students who helped Ken Zahnle make the series of Composing Women a huge success!

Born in Brooklyn in 1962, Jennifer Higdon grew up near Atlanta and in Appalachian Tennessee, teaching herself flute at 15 and playing drums in high school marching band… not beginning college composition studies until she was 21. Nevertheless, she earned degrees from Penn and the Curtis institute, where she would later teach composing.

From the studio… to the work camps… to the opera… and on to academia and America… Chen Yi is the most prominent woman of a generation of Chinese-born composers.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s career has been marked by several firsts: she was the first woman to graduate with a doctorate in composition from Julliard; she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music; and the first female composer to be mentioned in Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip Peanuts.

American Joan Tower did not originally intend to become a composer, but at 18 she wrote a piece for a college class and immediately thought, “I can do better”--- and, as she said in 2018, “for the next 60 years, I tried to do better.”

Scottish composer Thea Musgrave once had a dream in which a single clarinet player led the entire orchestra to mutiny--- a dream she realized in her 1967 Concerto for Orchestra.

Born Germaine Taillefesse… she changed her last name to spite her father, who tried to forbid her a career in music…Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of the famed generation of French composers known as The Six.

One composed brilliantly but died early in the 20th century… the other helped create the composers of the rest of the century.Sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger both achieved important firsts for women in music. Born into a Paris Conservatoire family, they showed their talent early: Nadia enrolled at the Conservatoire at the age of nine, and Lili tagged along with her to lessons… she was just four.

In 2009 a family began renovating an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, and were astonished to discover piles of paper throughout the home… music manuscripts.

Imagine composing music that was praised by critics, and then being told only a man could have written it!That happened more than once to English-born composer Rebecca Clarke. Born in 1886, she began her musical life with the violin, eventually became the first female composition student of famed composer and teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford convinced her to switch to the viola, on which she became a virtuoso. She soon had to make use of that skill when she criticized her father for his extramarital affairs… and he abruptly withdrew his financial support for her schooling.