Rebecca Saunders, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Olga Neuwirth, featured at Miller Theatre. Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

Last year, NewMusicBox, an online magazine for contemporary classical music, published an essay by the composer Amy Beth Kirsten entitled “The ‘Woman Composer’ Is Dead.” Kirsten acknowledged that women have had an agonizingly difficult time gaining a creative foothold in classical music, whose repertory is male-dominated to a stifling degree. But, in light of the international renown of such figures as Kaija Saariaho, Unsuk Chin, and Sofia Gubaidulina, she argued that the “woman composer” no longer required special pleading or affirmative action. “Neither art nor artist is served by segregation—even if it’s well intended,” Kirsten wrote. Rather than going out of their way to boost female composers, she suggested, programmers should embrace only works that speak to them strongly, trusting that women will continue to advance.

Kirsten’s article caused some controversy among her colleagues, although, in a welcome departure from the Internet norm, the discussion did not devolve into name-calling. “I look forward to the time I can wholly agree with your thoughts here,” the composer Kristin Kuster responded. Many commenters felt that Kirsten had underestimated the obstacles that remain. In addition to the outright sexism of certain male composition teachers—as recently as 1978, Aaron Copland suggested that women had an innate block against creating large-scale musical structures—there is the unintended bias of well-meaning performers, administrators, and, yes, critics, whose choices perpetuate the status quo. To pursue a career as a composer, you must not only write music but also set institutional gears in motion, win over the reluctant, promote yourself, bend reality to your vision. As Alexandra Gardner points out, in a recent post on NewMusicBox, women are not “culturally encouraged” to make such demands.

A conspicuous disparity persists. To date, the Met has performed only one opera by a woman: Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald,” in 1903. On Operabase’s 2012 list of the hundred most frequently performed opera composers, Saariaho is the lone female, in ninety-sixth place. The picture in the orchestral world is slightly brighter, with Jennifer Higdon, Augusta Read Thomas, and Joan Tower occupying the League of American Orchestras’ list of the twenty most popular living American composers. But the average orchestra plays, at most, one or two works by women each year. Often, such imbalances arise not because misogyny runs rampant but because only a few slots for new pieces are allotted, and these go to safely familiar male names. The problem would ease simply if more new music were played. Kirsten, in the comments to her essay, added, “Perhaps if we are going to fixate on equality in programming it should be to balance out the division between living composers and dead ones.”

This much is clear: hundreds of gifted women crowd the field, their styles ranging from the most dissonant avant-gardism to the most melodious post-minimalism. No concert series would suffer a loss of quality if more of their work were included. To the contrary, any institution that made a habit of spotlighting women would, by default, become a livelier place. It’s possible that the indifference to classical music observed in younger generations has something to do with the musty, clubby atmosphere of the repertory. To outsiders, the typical concert must look a bit like zombie night at the Bohemian Grove.

This season, two of the city’s strongest new-music series—Composer Portraits, at Miller Theatre, directed by Melissa Smey, and the Ecstatic Music Festival, curated by Judd Greenstein—have offered glimpses of a world in which the “woman composer,” in the embattled-minority sense, has ceased to exist. Three of the eight portraits in the Miller season have been devoted to women: Gubaidulina, Olga Neuwirth, and Rebecca Saunders. The Ecstatic festival, which presented ten concerts at Merkin Hall, featured as many women as men, with particular attention given to such composer-performers as Shara Worden, Carla Kihlstedt, and Imani Uzuri. In both cases, the choices were logical extensions of a governing philosophy that had nothing to do with gender: Smey is determined to keep New Yorkers informed about European trends, and Greenstein is immersed in the genre-bending ethic of Brooklyn’s music scene.

Some feminist-oriented composers and musicologists have sought to identify a common sensibility in women’s music; this gathering of personalities appeared to defeat such efforts. Going from concert to concert, I felt as though I were attending a festival of opposites. Kihlstedt’s new vocal work “At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire,” in which the composer both sang and played violin, gave an intricately shaded instrumental backdrop to spells of art-pop songwriting reminiscent, at times, of Björk. Neuwirth’s 2004 music-theatre piece “. . . ce qui arrive . . .” filters an echo of Kurt Weill’s cabaret style through an eerily bristling soundscape. Early in Gubaidulina’s String Trio, written in 1989, a harsh cluster of tones fans out into a luminous, though still dissonant, web of intervals—a harmony of outer spheres. Many of these composers seemed to be mediating between stylistic contradictions, but each went in her own direction.

Yet it can’t be said that gender made no difference. Kihlstedt and Worden, as performers, embody characters that their male colleagues cannot reproduce. Likewise, at a recent “Women’s Work” concert, at the Players Theatre, Kristin Norderval sang her song cycle “Nothing Proved,” based on poems by Queen Elizabeth I, with the accompaniment of the viol consort Parthenia. Although it was a concert piece, it felt like an opera in the making, conjuring in tensely shimmering, computer-enhanced textures the lofty isolation of the subject. A setting of the poem “O Fortune,” which Elizabeth wrote under house arrest during the reign of Queen Mary, rose to a ghostly fury that eclipsed past operatic portrayals of the monarch, from Donizetti to Britten. The female voice has always been opera’s chief vessel of high emotion; something powerful happens when those voices become not just the conduit but also the creative source.

The most striking concert in the Miller series was the one devoted to Rebecca Saunders, with performances by the excellent New York ensemble Either/Or. A European avant-garde luminary who has been little heard in New York, Saunders was born in London in 1967 and has been living in Germany since her early twenties. She could be described as an obdurate modernist, her style avoiding the neo-tonal tendencies common in the Anglo-American world. She makes few overt references to social issues or pop culture, such as one finds in the work of Neuwirth, who has written an opera based on David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” Yet the withdrawn, almost secretive atmosphere of Saunders’s music also sets it apart from the sonic thunder of mainstream modernism. She has said that she is most interested in the way sound materializes out of silence. In an onstage discussion with Richard Carrick, Either/Or’s co-founder, she said that she imagines herself “pulling on a thread and revealing a sound which is already there.”

Saunders may gravitate toward soft dynamics, but her music hardly makes a meek impression. The scores are interspersed with harsh, jarring gestures, often produced through distortions of conventional timbre: hard bowing near the bridge of a string instrument, crashing clusters on the piano, multiphonics in the winds (multiple tones generated by alternative fingerings or by singing while playing). There is also much bric-a-brac percussion, including metal plates struck with knitting needles and coffee cans rattling on timpani heads. You have a sense of fragile sounds hugely amplified, as if they were being picked up by a hypersensitive microphone.