This definitive source chronicles the lives and works of 875 women composers of Western classical music. Following the standards set by the twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music, most entries in this Dictionary include a detailed biography, an evaluation of the subject's music and her career, and a comprehensive list of her published and unpublished works. In one handy reference book you can now read about the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, the Renaissance madrigalist Maddalena Casulana, the flamboyant seventeenth-century vocal composer Barbara Strozzi, the prolific New Englander Amy Beach, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Throughout history women have been composing music, but until recently their achievements went largely unrecognized. Those few in earlier times who gained some renown were often as not the sisters, daughters, wives, or muses of well-known men - the surnames of Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann speak for themselves. Now, with a significant increase in the number of women composers and a burgeoning interest in their work, the need for authoritative information about these musicians is greater than ever. The Norton/ Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, produced by an international corps of experts, is the indispensable first choice of scholars, teachers, musicians, librarians, and all music lovers interested in women's creative contributions to Western art music.