Aurora Dainer, a first-year vocal performance and linguistics double major in the DCC program, has spent her spring semester questioning why women composers remain such a small fraction of the classical music canon. Through an independent study with DCC program director Professor Damien Pfister, she designed and performed a lecture-recital that examines how music by women is taught, programmed, and heard, and what young singers miss out on when they don’t encounter these composers early in their training.
Dainer entered the project already aware of how uneven the landscape can be. In orchestras, women currently make up about half of musicians, but ensembles remain segregated by instrument, and the stories told onstage still tend to center on men. Leading roles, sidekicks, and villains are usually male, while women often appear as wives, mothers, or non-complex supporting characters. She has felt an imbalance personally, too: when she auditioned for a local choir, she noticed that standards were higher for soprano voices because there was more competition, whereas deeper voices required a lower score to receive an invitation to join.
For her independent study, Dainer turned to a quieter form of exclusion—the repertoire young musicians are asked to learn and listen to. She was alarmed by a recent drop in female-composed pieces performed by orchestras nationwide, from 11.9 percent in the 2021-22 season to 9.7 percent in 2024-25. She researched the Grove online database of composers, styles, and musical eras and found that women’s work has been under-documented compared to that of men. For example, a bio of a female composer might be less than a third the length of that of a male composer, indicating a lack of research on these women in the field.
“One issue I see is that people aren’t listening to these composers early on and thus don’t develop an emotional attachment to their work,” she said. “And that leads to it not becoming established as important or canonical.”
Her response was to build the kind of introduction she wishes more young singers had. For her project, Dainer curated twelve songs by seven women composers that would be pedagogically appropriate for students at her level, including Maryland-based composer Lori Laitman, American composer Amy Beach, German composers Clara Schumann and Corona Schröter, French composer Nadia Boulanger, French-Spanish composer Pauline Viardot, and Mexican-American composer María Grever. She presented a lecture-recital for the DCC community on Monday, April 20, with examples from each of these composers that she sang in their respective languages.
“While my goal is partly about the stories that women can uniquely express through their music, it is more about educating people that women throughout classical music history have been equally innovative and representative of their era as their male counterparts,” she explained.
Throughout the semester, she prepared the music with her UMD vocal teacher, Teri Bickham, and other School of Music faculty and Pfister to shape the research component. The result was an evocative and informative lecture-recital that moved between song and commentary, situating each composer within a broader story about teaching and performing music by women in today’s classical industry.
“Aurora represents what DCC is all about—giving students opportunities to experiment creatively so that they might make the world a better place,” said Pfister. “We appreciate her willingness to share a combination of her talents and research with our community.”
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Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC) is a dynamic, social, and rigorous living-learning Honors College program at the vibrant intersections of arts and technology. DCC has carved out a special place for driven, creative, and artistic-minded students to simultaneously enjoy the access and comforts of a small, liberal arts college experience and the resources and privileges of a large research campus. Learn more about the DCC program at dcc.umd.edu.
Photo credit: Katelynn Callaghan.
