Were there any female composers in the baroque era?

“The Viola da Gamba Player”, portrait of composer Barbara Strozzi (circa 1630s). They were in the convents and in the courts, and occasionally they went freelance too. They were the female composers of the Baroque and they composed some of the greatest music you’ve possibly never heard.

21 of the greatest women composers in classical music

• Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Not only a composer of some 70 works, Hildegard was a writer, mystic and visionary. …
• Francesca Caccini (1587-1640) …
• Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) …
• Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) …
• Louise Farrenc (1804-1875) …
• Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847) …
• Clara Schumann (1819-1896) …
• Teresa Carreño (1853-1917)

1. Kassia of Constantinople. Correctly or not, Kassia – born around 805 – is often called “the first female composer of the Occident” (the Western world) and her place in Byzantine folkore was sealed even before we knew of her music.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) She’s the first identifiable woman composer in the history of Western Music. German Benedictine abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, who spent most of her 80-plus years shut away in an obscure hilltop monastery in Germany’s Rhineland.

Isabella Leonarda

During the Baroque era, women began entering the ranks of professional musicians, both as composers and as performers. Barbara Strozzi was an international sensation as an opera singer.

Throughout the Baroque period, and much of the world’s artistic history, women have been portrayed as either saints or sinners, pictures of purity or wicked temptresses. … If not soft and docile, women were depicted as whores, adulteresses and tricksters, wicked temptations to good men.

Musicians were often trained by family members or through apprenticeships. Women were not permitted to be music directors of instrumentalists in court or opera orchestras.

Baroque music had a melody, as did music in the past. Older music usually only had the single melody and that was it. Not many background parts and hardly any harmony. Baroque music usually focused on a soloist, sometimes vocal, sometimes instrumental, and give them a main melody.

In the Baroque period, composers expected musicians to add ornamentation, including trills, mordents, turns, appoggiaturas, grace notes, passing tones, etc. Use of vibrato was also considered an ornament. In addition to adding ornamentations, performers were expected to improvise, especially on cadences.