Throughout history, female composers have been overlooked in favor of their male counterparts to a great degree. By ignoring female composers’ contributions, the male dominance in representation in vocal literature continues without correction. Even with plentiful composed selections by females, educators remain close-minded when choosing vocal solos for their students. This paper aims to state the issue of how limited music educators are in assigning repertoire and offer suggestions that can diversify the repertoire being assigned. This paper will demonstrate the lack of female composers represented in the most common published vocal anthology books and vocal solo competition repertoire lists in Texas. Throughout the paper, I will be including discussions with distinguished voice teachers and significant people at the forefront of vocal diversity research. I will also be recommending art songs composed by women for high school and college singers that can function just as well as the traditional male-dominant selections. Results show that female compositions are woefully discounted in the NATS competition list, 38 published anthology books, and the list of vocal piece selections for all 3 classes on the UIL PML list.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Melinda Brou

School of Music