Ars Femina Archive: Resources

Vox Femina is a Los Angelous based musical group that focuses on creating diversity through choral music commissions.

A music maker-space in San Fransisco dedicated to providing musicians the tools necessary to create new music.

Athena Brass Band is a national musical organization that brings together women brass musicians from across the country. The group preformed at the Brass Band Invitational at Indiana University Southeast in June of 2009.

Concert presented by the US Army Chamber Players celebrating women's music. Composers included are Amy Beach, Valerie Coleman, Madeleine Dring, Caroline Shaw, and Reena Esmail.

Interview with Grammy award-winning composer and flutist Valarie Coleman, discussing her inspirations and experiences in music.

Interview with Joan Tower, Grammy award-winning composer, discussing her experiences in music.

Solo guitar pieces by Women composers collected by guitarist Heike Matthiesen, Frankfurt, Germany.

A collection of classical guitar music by women composers for guitar by Heike Matthiesen, Frankfurt, Germany.

Gallica is a French digital library that allows access to millions of documents related to French history and culture, and adds thousands of new information to its library every week. Gallica is a free resource that is extremely valuable to researchers looking for information on a variety of topics, especially those pertaining to France. Gallica primarily operates in French, but also has version of its website in English, to allow for the largest amount of people possible to be able to use the materials located within the library. Many of the French composers of the Ars Femina have digital versions of their manuscripts on Gallica, and information about those composers and their scores are listed on the website as well.

The Institute for Composer Diversity is located at the State University of New York at Fredonia within the university’s School of Music. The institute offers three different databases aimed at educating and celebrating diverse composers. The three databases are the “Composer Diversity Database,” the “Orchestra Database,” and the “Wind Band Database.” Additionally, the institute offers data on which orchestras play works by women or underrepresented composers due to race, ethnicity, or cultural heritage. This resource would be beneficial to researchers or performers interested in locating and performing music written by diverse composers. Performing music written by diverse composers is important since much of the music world is dominated by white males.

IMSLP is a free access website that hosts millions of musical scores dating from the inception of music notation to present day. All of the scores on the website are fair use, and a majority of the scores are digitalized versions of the original copies of musical manuscripts. IMSLP also offers multiple editions of scores, and organizes scores by their complete score (conductor’s), and the different parts of the score, for easy usability. A handful of the scores in the Ars Femina collection are also located on IMSLP in both their original form and different transcribed versions. The website also lists information about each composer and composition and is a vital source for musicians and historians.

List of notable women composers organized by timeperiod created by Oxford Music Online.