The works of the Archiv Frau und Musik in the individual instrumental categories have been or will be assigned a level of difficulty, which is particularly helpful when researching for concert programs.

List of women composers

Here you will find a list of 2,171 women composers – by no means all of them! But all those who have been collected since our archive was founded in 1979 or from whom usable material can be found in our archive.

• Because our website has a limited width, the table cannot be displayed in its entire width. Therefore you will find a movable dark gray bar at the bottom of the table view field. This allows you to move the table to the right, which still has three small tables in the large one.
• You can not only scroll through the composers from A-Z or Z-A, but also use the buttons at the top of the internal tables to filter by year of birth, year of death and country of origin. In this way, you can find out, for example, how many and which women composers are assigned to Italy. Simply click on the Italy field and all women composers from this country or nationality will be displayed on the left.
• If the whole list gets stuck while scrolling, please reload the page.
• Year of birth and death can be filtered in decades.
• Unknown (“Unbekannt”) birth years are placed in the first or fifth decade of the century, unknown death years in the last decade of the century or fourth of the next century.
• Women composers who are still alive are listed with the “year of death” 2024 (without a year of death they would be untraceable)
• Countries are mapped according to the current political units
• Several options can be selected individually with “Ctrl+left-click”, a series of options with “Shift+left-click”
• You can reset the filters using the “Remove filter” symbol (top right, funnel symbol)

Itemized:
425 Germany | 238 France | 266 USA | 130 Italy | 123 England | 80 Austria | 60 Russia | 60 Poland | 60 Netherlands | 56 Switzerland | 41 Brazil | 34 Japan | 34 Sweden | 33 Spain | 32 Norway | 30 Canada | 27 Czech Republic | 26 Romania | 24 Belgium | 23 South Korea | 22 Australia | 22 Finland | 15 Latvia | 12 Denmark | 12 Israel | 12 Mexico | 11 Estonia | 11 Scotland | 10 China | 10 Serbia | 10 Taiwan | 10 Hungary | 9 Ukraine | 7 Bulgaria | 7 Ireland | 7 Greece | 5 Azerbaijan | 5 Croatia | 5 Slovenia | 5 Wales | 4 Cuba | 4 Portugal | 4 Slovakia | 4 Turkey | 3 Lithuania | 3 South Africa | 3 Venezuela | 3 Belarus | 2 Argentina | 2 Iceland | 2 Kazakhstan | 2 Colombia | 2 Malaysia | 1 Armenia/Ethiopia/Byzantium/Bosnia/Chile/Hawaii (USA)/India/Indonesia/Iran/Luxembourg/Morocco/Montenegro/New Zealand/Nigeria/Philippines/Sri Lanka/Vietnam | 88 Unknown (as at: 6. June 2024)

Please note that these high numbers for Germany, France and England are due to the fact that there was an enormous number of literary-artistic-musical salons there, especially in the 19th century, which were predominantly run by women, and that these countries were centers of a booming piano-making industry – at a time when it was possible to compose predominantly and in sheer endless quantities for the piano.
The high figures for Italy, Austria etc. and German-speaking countries are also due to the fact that research into works by women first began there in the late 1970s and the pioneering women researchers predominantly came from these regions. They looked around in their own countries first because access was easier in the pre-Internet era and there were also important early women’s (music) networks in these countries thanks to the efforts of women’s (suffrage) campaigners. Listen to and watch our eight interviews to date with pioneers such as Eva Rieger, Gloria Coates, Barbara Heller etc.