Award-winning composer Sarah Kirkland Snider joins Boulanger Initiative co-founder Dr. Laura Colgate for a conversation about her creative practices and how her composition career led her to write her first opera: Hildegard, winner of the 2026 Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America. Set in 12th-century Germany, Snider’s premiering opera explores the mystic Hildegard of Bingen as she begins transcribing her divine visions.

Join Boulanger Initiative for a virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told.

Join Boulanger Initiative for a virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told.

Missed BI’s Summer 2026 Virtual Intensives? This ticket grants you access to the video archives for Boulanger Initiative's Summer 2026 Virtual Courses: "Where are the Women," "America 250," and "Orchestrating Gender: The Forgotten Symphonists." Each ticket purchase is only valid for the course selected, and access to videos will expire on September 30, 2026.

Take a tumultuous ride into the forgotten voices of orchestral music. Boulanger Initiative returns swinging for the women symphonists too often actively hidden from the spotlight: Marianna Martines, Louise Farrenc, Emilie Mayer, Augusta Holmès, Florence Price, Julia Perry, and many more. This virtual course traces the evolution of the orchestra through the women who were there from the beginning with guided discussion, listening excerpts, and practical tips for discovering overlooked repertoire. Explore once-celebrated works later erased by canon formation, while placing these composers in their proper cultural, historical, and artistic contexts. Examine how institutions, pedagogy, and power shaped what we call “great music,” and deepen your understanding of orchestral history through a fuller, richer, and more accurate lens. 

Come and learn the REAL story of Classical music in the United States. BI goes head to head with the assumption that US-American music was written solely by men, and introduces you to the Women Composers of the United States: not as additions, but as essential voices in shaping the nation’s sound. This virtual course excavates the buried history of women's voices, revealing a more balanced and accurate musical landscape shaped by a diverse range of creators, Crosby, Palmer Knapp, Crawford Seeger, Queen Lili’uokalani, Ruthven Lang, and many, many more. Enter into a guided discussion, listen to samples of once well-known music and composers who were buried by history and the myth of male legitimacy, and deepen your understanding of the United States’ musical identity. 

Join Boulanger Initiative for a virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told. For the month of June (and in honor of BI staff Angel Azzarra's birthday), we will be celebrating composers who wrote operas! You don't want to miss out on learning about the amazing women who wrote for such a larger-than-life genre!

Where are the women? This course will answer this question, beginning with a brief discussion examining why, in the 21st century, the Classical music industry is still not inclusive of music by women. We will discover how we got here, what needs to be done, and what you can do to create a more level playing field for the future of classical music. Each day will cover a different era of music history from the Baroque through present day, discussing the conditions and context of the time that enabled or prevented women from composing music, highlighting multiple composers from each era, and providing a list of works and recording locations with which participants can further familiarize themselves.

Join Boulanger Initiative for a virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told. This month, we are working on composers whose articles are only a few sentences long, AKA "stubs!"

Much of the scholarship concerning women composers has focused on biography and the task of making scores available to performer. Relatively little has dealt with the music itself and the aesthetic criteria we need in order to treat these women the ways we address the male composers of the canon. In this talk, Dr. Susan McClary will discuss music by Kaija Saariaho and other composers working today.

You don’t have to hang up your artistry to build a career in the arts. Sopranos and Strategists is a practical, honest session about transitioning from performance to a dual career in nonprofit arts administration,  without losing your creative identity along the way.

Led by a working opera singer and BI's Director of Institutional Advancement, this session breaks down what arts admin looks like from the inside: the roles, the realities, and the opportunities for artists who want to shape the future of cultural organizations. This presentation will provide resources on how to translate your artistic training into strategic skills, navigate the job landscape, and position yourself for work that’s both creative and sustainable.

Join Boulanger Initiative and ChamberQUEER for a co-hosted, virtual Wikithon editing party! Whether you’re a seasoned editor or a first-timer, help expand and improve Wikipedia entries highlighting women’s achievements across history, culture, and the arts. Bring your curiosity, your keyboard, and your love for stories that deserve to be told.

Expanding the collective understanding of the contributions and impact of gender-marginalized composers is integral to cultivating inclusivity and representation in music. Wikipedia is one of the most accessible platforms when it comes to raising awareness; however, many of the articles present overstate the family and relationships of gender-marginalized composers while severely understating their professional achievements.

Focusing on his work with the music of Fernande Decruck, this presentation considers the conductor’s role in sustaining and amplifying the legacies of overlooked composers, with a focus on women. Dr. Aubin will situate Decruck’s music within broader conversations about historical omission, modern rediscovery, and advocacy through thoughtful programming. Emphasis will be placed on how a multipronged approach—combining scholarship, performance, and institutional advocacy—can support lasting change in the repertoire.

In this never-before-seen workshop from Boulanger Initiative, we are going to share with you a host of “deep-cut,” non-white women composers; equally worthy of study and performance as the relative monolith of Florence Price, we will take you on a journey from the Renaissance into the 21st-century with composers from around the world.

Expanding the collective understanding of the contributions and impact of gender-marginalized composers is integral to cultivating inclusivity and representation in music. Wikipedia is one of the most accessible platforms when it comes to raising awareness; however, many of the articles present overstate the family and relationships of gender-marginalized composers while severely understating their professional achievements.

When Avril Coleridge-Taylor tried to make sense of the events unfolding around her during World War II, she responded in the only way that made sense to her — through composing. By the war’s end she had written a significant number of war works, ranging from a solo piano piece commemorating the R.A.F. dead, to a vast choral and orchestral epic based on General MacArthur’s disastrous campaign in the Philippines. Yet at the time of her death in 1998, most of these pieces remained unpremiered. Even today, Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s music is relatively unknown. If she has been heard of at all, it is mostly for being the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. This talk explores Coleridge-Taylor’s wartime work, and the biographical issues that arise when writing about this period of her life.

Join Boulanger Initiative's Research Manager Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney for an expanded view of American composers in recognition of the U.S.A.'s 250th anniversary. Rather than the patriarchal framework put in place by music scholarship for the last century, Dr. McKinney will share the names, stories, and above all, music, by women composers and creators in the U.S. since its founding. Register now to get a look into the more complete and inclusive history of American classical music!

Expanding the collective understanding of the contributions and impact of gender-marginalized composers is integral to cultivating inclusivity and representation in music. Wikipedia is one of the most accessible platforms when it comes to raising awareness; however, many of the articles present overstate the family and relationships of gender-marginalized composers while severely understating their professional achievements.

Between 1930 and 1959, the Lyceum & Lawn Tennis Club, a women’s organization in Vedado, Havana, hosted numerous concerts organized by the Sociedad Orquesta de Música de Cámara de La Habana (SOMC), including a 1941 concert by Aaron Copland. They also hosted new music concerts sponsored by the Pan American Association of Composers and the Grupo de Renovación Musical. By focusing on María Muñoz de Quevedo and Gisela Hernández, I show how Lyceum members enacted a social and cultural mission that overlapped with the modernist values of local composers and musicians as well as with Pan Americanist ideals of mutual understanding through cultural exchange.

This talk will focus on the scholarly and performance work of Dr. Louise Toppin to unearth forgotten composers like Undine Smith Moore, Margaret Bonds, Julia Perry, Valerie Capers, Irene Britton Smith, Florence Price, and Regina Baiocchi, as well as her efforts to position them in their rightful place in our musical canon.

BI's monthly Wikithons are designed to improve the coverage of gender-marginalized composers on Wikipedia by improving pages, updating language, and providing more extensive information surrounding the individuals and their music. All events include a brief tutorial, editing support, and everything you need to get started in making an impact! People of all gender identities and expressions are invited to participate.

With the arrival of Dr. Samantha Ege's latest recording Avril Coleridge-Taylor: Piano Concerto and Orchestral Works with the BBC Philharmonic this November, Dr. Samantha Ege reflects on her multifaceted career as a scholar and performer. She talks about her mission to bring the music of underrepresented composers out of the archive and into the recording catalogue. Discussing composers such as Florence Price, Undine Smith Moore, and Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Dr. Ege imparts the tools and strategies behind her work.

In this never-before-seen workshop from Boulanger Initiative, we are going to share with you a host of “deep-cut,” non-white women composers; equally worthy of study and performance as the relative monolith of Florence Price, we will take you on a journey from the Renaissance into the 21st-century with composers from around the world. This session will serve as a next step for utilizing the skills from Research 101 for educators and musicians looking to expand repertoire and put them into use in your own classrooms and performance practice.

In this workshop, attendees will learn a myriad of physical and digital resources and methods to discover new repertoire and composers and enhance their knowledge of music history. Our research workshop focuses on the how, where, and why behind the research. This session covers early stages of starting research, including where to begin finding resources and how to use both physical and digitized materials in libraries, archives, and beyond. We will dig into how different resources are valuable and how they can be applied to different practices and paths including finding repertoire, researching composers, and everything in between.

Expanding the collective understanding of the contributions and impact of gender-marginalized composers is integral to cultivating inclusivity and representation in music. Wikipedia is one of the most accessible platforms when it comes to raising awareness; however, many of the articles present overstate the family and relationships of gender-marginalized composers while severely understating their professional achievements.

Join Boulanger Initiative’s Research Manager Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney and librarians from the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia as they uncover works for orchestra by women composers found in the collection. Learn more about names you may know, like Amy Beach and Lili Boulanger, and discover even more outstanding music by names you might not recognize, like Elsa Calcagno, Minne T. Wright, Radie Britain, and more!

How many women composers can you name? Wondering why you don't hear more music written by women at concerts? This session examines why, in the 21st century, the classical music industry is still not inclusive of music by women. Discover how we got here, what needs to be done, and what you can do to create a more level playing field for the future of classical music.