Figure 9.1 (a) Gabriela Ortiz; (b) Tania León; (c) Gabriela Frank

Women have not always occupied a central place in this textbook because of the marginalized position they traditionally held in society and the very limited professional opportunities available to them in the past. In the Middle Ages and well into the colonial period, women were not permitted to sing in church when men were present. This was in obedience to an injunction historically attributed to St. Paul in I Corinthians 14:34 stating that “women should keep silence in the churches.” Thus, women were not allowed to sing or even perform on musical instruments during worship services, except in convents or orphanages. Since it was in a church’s musical establishment that one got the training necessary for writing complex sacred polyphony, this effectively eliminated women from the ranks of Renaissance composers. Noblewomen could, of course, take private music lessons, but only to enhance their social graces. With the rise of opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the increasing commercial demand for female voices, women began to appear more prominently in professional musical circles and to get the sort of training they needed to write music. But they were rarely accepted as professional composers. In the nineteenth century, female performers such as Venezuela’s Teresa Carreño (see chapter 4) gained celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, and they composed and even published piano pieces, songs, and chamber works; however, they were not taken seriously as composers of larger works like symphonies and operas. Women were not thought to possess the intellectual gifts necessary for writing works of such complexity. In fact, the world most women inhabited remained bounded by domestic responsibilities until well into the twentieth century, when a rising tide of equal rights gave them greater access to musical education and professional opportunities in both performance and composition. Today, some of the leading composers of our time are women and they write in all genres, including symphonic works, and for all media including electronic as well as acoustic. Three are featured in this chapter.