Five Influential Women in Music

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’re honoring women composers both past and present. We asked five accomplished women composers about other women in music who have influenced their careers as a composer. Read on to learn more about these inspiring women and their impact on the world of choral music.

Sherry Blevins

Influential Woman Composer: Jocelyn Hagen
Highlighted Piece: Needle & Thread from This Is How You Love

Jocelyn Hagen has had the most profound influence on me as a composer and has had a great deal of influence on my career since meeting her in the summer of 2018, just three years into my composing career. I first had the pleasure of working with Jocelyn Hagen at the CORO Composer’s Institute in Iowa where she and her husband, Tim Takach, were instructors. It was then that Jocelyn gave me advice and encouragement about several of my works, and her belief in me led me to my first all-state premiere. Shortly after that, I was honored to have my pieces Looking for Light and If I Call to You, My Love published in her Compose Like a Girl series.

Through her series in her own publishing house, JH Music (Graphite Publishing), she seeks to empower composers who identify as women through mentorship, editorial direction, publication, and promotion. She also started a book club reading another woman composer’s book and schedules periodic Zoom sessions with the women in her series to help mentor, guide, and support us.

This past summer, Matthew Workman of National Concerts invited me to premiere my first work at Carnegie Hall (Awaken). I was so fortunate that Jocelyn was also premiering her work Searching for Dark Matter at Carnegie that same day. It was a dream to have my music premiere on that same stage, knowing that Jocelyn helped me get there. What humbles me most is that Jocelyn is one of five composers who will join me as an instructor at the International Choral Composers Institute, which I founded in 2024, and which will have its inaugural week this summer in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The piece of Jocelyn Hagen’s that I’d like to highlight is Needle & Thread from This Is How You Love. This was one of the first pieces I had ever heard of Jocelyn’s – a work based on thoughts shared by real couples in therapy. I was amazed at its ingenuity and marveled at how creative it was while still being catchy and singable. Her driving motives manage to take two simple lines of text and create a magical work that is a symphony unto itself. It is no wonder that so many aspire to be what Jocelyn Hagen has already achieved – a composer of influence who inspires us, moves us, and through her art changes our world for the better.

Emily Crocker

Influential woman composer: Joyce Eilers
Highlighted pieces: Send Down the Rain and The Irish Blessing

1963 was a year of turmoil and change, with bombings, demonstrations, assassinations – and Beatlemania is unleashed on America! And Joyce Elaine Eilers, a newly minted graduate of Oklahoma City University, started her first job as a music teacher in a small town in Oklahoma. This was not a particularly distinguished music program. The junior high had a girls’ choir which required the enrollment of all the girls in the school – no boys, they all played football – and a high school girls’ choir which included maybe a dozen girls. But Joyce was resourceful and ambitious, and through the sheer force of her personality she built the membership of these choirs, started a mixed chorus that soon included perhaps 80% of the high school student body, a chamber choir, a junior high boy’s chorus and more.

As luck or destiny would have it, I was an eighth grader in the choir, and she soon recruited me as the accompanist. We loved her. She was funny, optimistic, she pushed us, she expected excellence, and we worked hard for her. But at the end of the year, Joyce had her eye set on other goals and she left Oklahoma for a job in Oregon. I left too, moving with my family back to Texas.

Joyce devoted these early years to discovering how kids learn music. For deeply personal reasons which she never fully revealed, she had decided that no child would ever be kept out of her choir because they couldn’t carry a tune. So, she tried tricks and gimmicks, and after years of experimentation, she began to discover what did work, and to her surprise, there was very little published music that incorporated these techniques. When she approached publishers, most turned her away, saying there was no market for vocal music at this level. But Joyce was nothing if not persistent – and she proved them all wrong. Perhaps single-handedly, she created a publishing category for elementary and middle school nonselective choirs – and she was wildly successful.

Joyce also understood the mind and heart of a child. Simple melodies and harmonies when sung in tune and with conviction and feeling by a young chorus can be profoundly moving. Joyce was a champion of other composers and arrangers, becoming a mentor and editor of many writers and educators that are active today. I am one such composer.

Katerina Gimon

Influential woman composer: Sarah Quartel
Highlighted piece: Snow Angel

I’m so grateful for the many incredible women composers who have shaped and continue to shape me as a musician, composer, and in my career overall – so choosing just one is no easy task! Today, I find myself thinking back to an important early exposure – my introduction to the work of fellow Canadian composer and Ontario native Sarah Quartel.

As a youth singing with the Hamilton Children’s Choir, I had the opportunity to learn several of her works, including Snow Angel – when it was still in manuscript form! Needless to say, I fell in love with it – the beautiful storytelling, the emotional depth, the musical journey – everything. I lost myself in it, studied it like the nerd I am, and still every time I come back to it, I feel the magic just as I did the first time. In my final years with the Hamilton Children’s Choir, we were lucky enough to meet Sarah and work on Snow Angel with her. I remember being so awestruck and inspired hearing her speak about her music and journey to composing – seeing her energy, her passion, her creativity, and her drive.

Looking back, I know those moments – learning Snow Angel and working with Sarah – planted an important seed in my own artistic journey. This was one of the first times I connected to a piece of choral music so deeply and truly saw myself as someone who might belong in that world too – as a composer myself. Years later, I’m incredibly grateful to call Sarah a colleague and to have my music programmed alongside hers, but I’ll always remain a Sarah Quartel fangirl at heart!

Susan LaBarr

Influential woman composer: Alice Parker
Highlighted piece: Bright Morning Stars

I feel like I started composing a bit by accident. While working on my graduate degree in music theory, I took a required choral arranging class. I enjoyed the class and found success in my projects there, and one of the pieces I arranged during that time ended up being performed by my college choir. The next year, my choir director asked me to arrange another piece for the choir, and this sort of thing snowballed until I ended up receiving a commission from someone I didn’t know personally yet (Dr. Andrew Crane at East Carolina University at the time). Up to that point, I had only had one choral arranging class and a couple of composition lessons in my formal training. It wasn’t until I studied with Alice Parker at her Composers Workshop in 2012 that I felt like I started to hone my compositional technique.

I went back to Alice’s home a second time in 2013 for her Melody Studies workshop. I remember a moment where I sat at Alice’s piano and she stood behind me (just like Robert Shaw would stand behind Alice when she would present a new arrangement to him) and she analyzed my work while I played through it for her, occasionally reaching forward to make a mark on the score with her pencil. Alice taught me as much as any choral director how to sing a melody with emotion. She made the word “counterpoint” a hundred times less scary. She reminded me not to force a melody into being but rather to find the music that already exists in the poetry. She taught me that I could be a successful professional and a mother. She helped me to see that music is much, much more than the black and white of the page.

Alice’s arrangement of the 19th-century American spiritual Bright Morning Stars is a piece of hers that holds a special place in my heart. I learned this melody at her workshop, sitting in her studio with several other composers. This arrangement is at the same time incredibly simple and incredibly deep. Alice explained that the choral parts mimic chords that might have been played on an autoharp or guitar (imagine a group of people singing around a campfire). She noted that the melody doesn’t try to cram all of the words into it, but rather flexes in time to allow the words to flow naturally. The song evokes ideas of hope for the “morning” and hope for something beyond this life on earth. Bright Morning Stars became the number one song I sang to my son when he was a baby; I’ve also heard choirs sing it gloriously in beautiful spaces. Alice wasn’t sure at first if such a simple arrangement was worthy of publishing, but I was able to convince her. Sometimes the barest of arrangements can make space for incredible music to be made.

Andrea Ramsey

Influential woman composer: Marie-Claire Saindon
Highlighted pieces: Terre Neuve and Le Train D’hiver

I love how evocative Marie-Claire Saindon’s writing is. I listen to Le Train D’hiver and I can sense a winter train rushing through a snowy landscape. I listen to Terre Neuve and I’m experiencing the rugged landscapes of Newfoundland.

Honestly, there are so many incredible compositional voices to be found in Canadian women composers right now: Marie-Claire Saindon, Katerina Gimon, Tracy Wong, Shireen Abu-Khader, Kathleen Allan, Sarah Quartel, Leslee Heys and more. I am fortunate to be alive in a time when they are writing and to have them as peers. I am even more fortunate to consider some of them friends. Marie-Claire and I text message sometimes and I feel a kinship with her. We are both introverts, have cats, and a love of melody and text painting.

Terre Neuve is gorgeous and evocative. SATB or SSAA, it’s an absolute winner. I’ve programmed it for various all-state choirs and the chamber choir at the University of Oregon when I was briefly covering for Dr. Sharon Paul’s sabbatical.

Explore more music by women composers in our site.