Women

[Starrmark]

IMSLP lists composers categorized according to their nationality. One of the most extraordinary contributions of IMSLP is the number of virtually unknown women composers whose music has been exhumed from historical oblivion. I suggest there be another index on IMSLP: for women composers.

MS

[daphnis]

Agreed. That would be quite a useful category for others, I suspect.

[NLewis]

A good idea.

[Eric]

Fourth'd...
Have become very interested especially after reading a claim that Amy Beach was the first significant female US composer on a blog today- after seeing all the 19th century ones preceding her that must not have been significant or not American (just listed in LoC scans because they had works published in the US), - still, I felt this claim needed looking further into , somehow.
(No doubt e.g. Olga v. Radecki (born and died in Riga, 1853-1933, spent a lot of her time in Boston) was Latvian, not American, but still contributed to American musical life (and I wonder what happened to her piano trio e.g.)
(And Heinrich/Henry Kleber's pupil and 2nd wife Christiana Manns-Kleber might be worth looking into also- don't know...)

[Fynnjamin]

Any progress on this yet? Certainly would be a worthy category to have.

[Choralia]

FYI, this category exists already at CPDL:

http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Women_composers

Not many items in that category, indeed: just 32 women composers over 1988 composers listed there.

Max

[Fynnjamin]

Making a start here: http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Women_composers
A veritable army!