MP3: Music Theory Examples by Women

Collaborative Goals

In collaboration with Fourscoreandmore, founded by Mark Gotham (Durham University), we seek to democratize access to music theory with free access to digital-age resources for teachers and students. Our goals are to continue developing work done in conjunction with Fourscoreandmore and to promote the scholarship and performance of music by women.

In coordination with Fourscoreandmore we support the international crowdsourcing of score encodings and host an analysis-a-thon each year. These events continue our work in two ways: (1) to expand on the existence and availability of scores by women composers in computer-readable formats that enable easy, efficient, and versatile inclusion into classroom activities; and (2) human analyses of those scores to the same ends. In previous work, Music by Women has acted as a focus for international attention to this matter, and Fourscoreandmore has begun the process of encoding and analyzing. In the 2023-2024 academic year, we started collaborating with the developer for TiLia, which is proving to be an even more fruitful platform for encoding musical analysis.

Each year, through events timed to coincide with Women’s History Month, we coordinate a particularly intense extension of this score encoding effort along with performance and study of works by women composers from our host institutions. Our group is growing, and now includes organizers from the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.