Sheet Music by Female Composers: A Rich and Diverse Selection

This is a warm and tender piece setting the last three verses of Christina Rossetti's 'What good shall my life do me?', which encourages leading a life of love as an example for others. Daley's heartf...

This is a warm and tender piece setting the last three verses of Christina Rossetti's 'What good shall my life do me?', which encourages leading a life of love as an example for others. Daley's heartf...

Composed for International Women's Day, this mesmerising piece celebrates the centennary of Rosalind Franklin and sets her own words with additional text by the poet Seán Street. McDowall's tribute to...

This a cappella setting of evocative words by E. Pauline Johnson is immediately appealing, with its playful, swinging syncopations and dancing scat accompaniment. Also available in a version for SSAA...

This a beautiful and meditative setting of a translated text from Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Gaelic hymns, prayers, and other texts. With gentle suspensions and exquisite harmonies, this anthem...

This uplifting anthem sets the Invocation text from Carmina Gadelica. McDowall's beautiful melodies flow and intertwine, decorated by scotch snaps that reflect the text's origin. Suitable for services...

Introduced by the children's choir, Quartel's simple and uplifting melody repeats throughout the piece, beautifully coloured by the surrounding parts. The voices offer joyful praise and the rich harmo...

My song is love unknown is an expressive and fluid setting of the well-known Lenten text by Samuel Crossman. McGlade highlights the phrase 'take frail flesh and die' with a sighing musical motif, befo...

My song is love unknown is an expressive and fluid setting of the well-known Lenten text by Samuel Crossman. McGlade highlights the phrase 'take frail flesh and die' with a sighing musical motif, befo...

Originally published in The Ivy and the Holly, Andrew's polymetric setting of this traditional text is evocative and energetic, with sustained vocalizations and creative melodies that bounce around th...

From the collection Love Songs, 'Dear Love' sets a text by American writer Willa Cather. Scored for SATB unaccompanied, this meditation on the universality of love features rich, lucid harmonies and c...

Composed for International Women's Day, this mesmerizing piece celebrates the centennary of Rosalind Franklin and sets her own words with additional text by the poet Seán Street. . . .

The composer has combined a single line of Latin, 'O virgo splendens', with an earthy, late 13th-century Marian text in Middle English to create a work which reflects both the divine and the human qua...

The Island Itself is a setting of the poem Homage to Omey by Irish poet, Joan McBreen. The imagery of the sea conveyed in the text is reflected through lilting, syncopated rhythms. The melody is suppo...

Scored especially for ATB to meet social distancing requirements, this piece has both special resonance and practical application in these uncertain times. McGlade's characteristic unaccompanied style...

This setting of Edward Caswall's well-known text shows all the hallmarks of McGlade's characteristic style, with changing time signatures, beguiling chromaticisms, and a beautiful, fluid melody. Chang...

Commissioned by Sonoro for the second instalment of their Choral Inspirations project, McDowall has composed Crucifixus Reimagined as a response to Lotti's Crucifixus from Credo in F. Use of suspensio...

Setting words by the composer, One of these days is an affirmatory piece with pop-inspired rhythms and harmonies. The scat syllables and repeating patterns of the lower parts provide a rich cushion fo...

One of McGlade's longer settings, As the hart begins simply, before expanding into a more complex central section with fluctuating time signatures and shifting tonalities. Ideal for advanced mixed-voi...

Setting Revelation 21: 1-5, this short anthem is in McGlade's typically fluid style, with harmonic twists, changing metres, and tempo fluctuations. With some divisi in the upper parts, it will be part...

Taken at a slow processional tempo this work has a predominantly canonic texture. The syncopated passages are at once sombre and sensual, and the balancing homphonic phrases achieve real power. A shor...

This is one of Clarke's many pieces on love, and one of the best. It combines the English modality of earlier times with foretastes of the adventurous chromaticism of her later work. It is a lovely pi...

This is a lilting take on the Elizabethan lute-song full of smooth Stanford-like nineteenth-century harmonies, exquisitely tempered with modal effects.

This is an appropriately aching setting of Sir Philip Sidney's poem of unending desire and longing. There are gorgeous chromatics and enharmonics and a masterful use of a triplet pattern which becomes...