Please reference as: Tamboukou, M. 2025. 'Soundscapes and Echoes, Research Context, Questions and Ideas', https://sites.google.com/view/soundscapesandechoes/home/research-context-questions-and-ideas
Research Context
On January 1, 2025, the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert marked a historic milestone: for the first time in its 85-year history, a composition by a woman was included in the program. The selected work, Ferdinandus-Walzer, was composed in 1848 by Austrian musician Constanze Geiger when she was just 12 years old. Conducted by Riccardo Muti, the piece was presented as a recognition of artistic merit. While this inclusion was widely celebrated, it also underscored the enduring gender inequalities in classical music. The Vienna Philharmonic itself only admitted women as full members in 1997, and to this day, no woman has conducted the orchestra.
Geiger’s case exemplifies a recurring pattern in music history: despite public recognition during their lifetimes, many women composers have been systematically excluded from the canon. A composer, pianist, actress, and singer, Geiger made her concert debut at the age of six. In 1848, her Ferdinandus-Walzer premiered at the Sofiensaal under the direction of Johann Strauss Sr., who also dedicated his Flora Quadrille to her—a testament to her prominence in Vienna’s musical circles. (see Wiener Philharmoniker) Yet, despite such early recognition, Geiger remains largely absent from mainstream musical narratives. This erasure reflects broader structural patterns in which women’s contributions to classical music are repeatedly acknowledged in moments of symbolic
inclusion but rarely integrated into the long-term institutional memory of the field.
The marginalization of women composers is not simply a historical oversight but an ongoing structural issue. Despite high female participation in music education, women remain significantly underrepresented in professional composition and conducting. The 2023–2024 Donne Foundation report highlights the persistence of these inequalities. Analyzing programming data from 111 orchestras across 30 countries, the report found that only 7.5% of performed works were by women—a slight decline from previous years. Within this figure, 5.8% were composed by white women, while only 1.6% were by women from the global majority. The ten most performed composers—all historical white men—accounted for 30.6% of all works played, demonstrating the entrenched dominance of a narrow, exclusionary canon. Despite increasing public discourse around diversity, classical music institutions have shown marked resistance to structural change. Christina Scharff’s Equality and Diversity in the Classical Music Profession (2015) revealed that systemic barriers—including gendered divisions of labour, the myth of meritocracy, and exclusionary networking practices—continue to restrict women’s access to creative leadership roles.
These findings underscore the need to move beyond representation statistics and interrogate the institutional, cultural, and epistemic structures that shape women’s exclusion from classical music. This project addresses this challenge by foregrounding women composers’ auto/biographical writings as crucial yet overlooked sites of self- representation and resistance. Rather than treating these texts as supplementary biographical sources, it examines them as documents of life that reveal how women composers have navigated, contested, and reimagined themselves and their place in music history. By tracing the historical roots of these exclusions and analyzing composers’ self-narratives, this project constructs a feminist genealogy of the female self in classical music. It moves beyond recovery work to critically interrogate how musical histories are produced, whose voices are heard, and what it means to write the history of women
omposers on their own terms.
Reframing the Problem
Why are women composers still marginalized in classical music, and how can we rethink gender equity and diversity in this field? This project engages these pressing questions by constructing a feminist genealogy of women composers, centering their 'documents of life'—auto/biographies, journals, diaries, and letters. While feminist cultural historians and musicologists have made significant strides in recovering women’s names and works (see Glickman & Schleifer, 1998), their personal writings have often been treated as supplementary biographical evidence rather than examined as complex narratives of self-formation. Yet these texts offer rich, often contradictory insights into how women composers negotiated artistic identity, professional constraints, and historical exclusion. By revisiting their narratives, this project not only deepens our understanding of historical marginalization but also highlights the structural and intersectional barriers that persist in classical music today.
This research project addresses a critical gap in scholarship by tracing the long and uneven process of becoming a woman composer in modern Europe. A striking example is the aforementioned Constanze Geiger, who enjoyed significant recognition in her lifetime—performed and praised by Johann Strauss—only to disappear from the classical repertoire. How did she, and others like her, define themselves as composers within the constraints of their time? How did they make sense of their exclusion, and what strategies did they develop to resist or navigate it? A feminist genealogy of women composers seeks to uncover these histories, not merely to recover forgotten figures, but to interrogate the mechanisms that shaped their visibility and erasure.
Building on my established scholarship in feminist genealogies, narrative analysis, and archival research this project extends existing approaches by prioritizing composers’ own writings over the institutional frameworks that have historically defined them. As Marie Linda Caruso (2014, 17–19) has noted, my genealogical methodology has been instrumental in reconstructing women composers’ narratives of the self. This project follows that trajectory, offering a new way of reading their histories—one that foregrounds their own voices rather than external interpretations of their significance.
Methodology
This project adopts a genealogical approach, drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of genealogy as an interrogation of how knowledge, truth, and subjectivity are historically constituted. Rather than presenting a linear history of progress, genealogy examines the contingent, often discontinuous processes through which particular social and cultural realities take shape. In applying this approach to women in classical music, the project asks:
What is the present condition of women composers?
How has this reality been historically constructed?
And how might alternative futures be imagined?
These questions structure the project’s exploration of historical narratives, institutional barriers, and personal self-narration. As mentioned above, my research has long focused on the formation of the female self in various public spheres—education, art, the garment industry, science, and mathematics. Extending this inquiry to classical music, the project examines how women composers have been both included and excluded, celebrated and erased. Their marginalization is not simply a matter of omission but a reflection of uneven historical developments—as seen in the case of Constanze Geiger, whose music was once embraced by the Viennese elite but later disappeared from concert programs. What happened in the intervening years? Why do women composers remain at the periphery of classical music history? A genealogical approach resists simplistic narratives of loss and recovery, instead analyzing the power structures, cultural practices, and discourses that have shaped these exclusions.
This genealogical investigation unfolds along three key axes:
1. Mapping the Present
The project begins with a detailed analysis of contemporary surveys, such as the UNESCO 2005 Convention Global Report series and the Donne Foundation’s bi-annual reports, to chart patterns of inequality in classical music. By examining how gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural background intersect in shaping women’s careers, this analysis situates historical exclusions within broader, ongoing structures of marginalization.
2. Archival Research, Guided by ‘Archival Sensibility’
Rather than approaching the archive with a fixed hypothesis, this research follows what my colleagues and I have termed 'archival sensibility' (Moore et al. 2016)—a method that remains attuned to the contingencies of historical materials. Instead of imposing retrospective coherence, this approach allows
for the complexities and unpredictabilities of archival traces to shape the inquiry. By uncovering overlooked documents, it seeks to illuminate the diverse ways women composers positioned themselves within musical networks, artistic movements, and institutional constraints.
3. Narrative and Discourse Analysis
Drawing on my collaborative work with Mona Livholts (Livholts & Tamboukou, 2015), this project examines women composers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs as active sites of self-inscription and resistance. Rather than treating these texts as passive biographical records, it interrogates how composers articulated their artistic identities, negotiated exclusion, and engaged with dominant musical discourses. The analysis deconstructs how certain narratives became authoritative while others were silenced, shedding light on the historiographical processes that have shaped our understanding of women in classical music. At the same time, it preserves the richness of these writings, recognizing their authors’ self-representations as fluid and evolving rather than fixed identities. By combining these methodological approaches within a wider feminist genealogy, the project moves beyond recovering lost voices to critically examining the structures that have sustained their marginalization. This genealogical lens not only reinterprets the past but also serves as a framework for reconfiguring how exclusionary structures might be challenged and transformed. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on gender equity and diversity in classical music, offering insights into how histories of exclusion continue to shape the present—and how they might be undone.
Research Objectives
In deploying a genealogical and comparative approach to consider women composers in classical music, the project aims to:
Map histories and geographies of exclusion by repositioning women in classical music history, exploring the systematic marginalization of women composers across different historical periods and musical landscapes while investigating how they challenged exclusion and reshaped musical narratives.
Analyse personal narratives to uncover existential modalities of subjectivity and creative practices through the examination of letters, diaries, and memoirs.
Develop a new theoretical framework to reconceive how entanglements of gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural background shaped women womposers' experiences, moving beyond intersections to capture the complexity of deeper, intertwined realities at play.
Inform contemporary debates by providing historically grounded perspectives on equity, diversity, and inclusion in classical music today