A while back, when I first discovered the curated site Many Many Women and tweeted it, Listening to Ladies did me the courtesy of a retweet, and I was happy to discover them. Begun in June 2015, the curated music site features a daily online showcase of works by women composers, a concert series, and a weekly podcast. Composer Elisabeth Blair and singer-songwriter Krystee Wylder are the engines behind the curtains.
The heart of the Listening to Ladies website is their blogroll, an almost daily showcase of one piece of work by a woman composer. You’ll find it on their landing page and under the BLOG menu tab. While they do have an archived list of the composers featured, it seems to be a non-dynamic Excel list with no linkbacks to the original blog post of that composer. That makes this curation site a bit difficult to navigate. They seem also not to have a “search this website” widget. Thus, your only recourse for finding an artist is to scroll back through the blogroll or run a Google site search with the following syntax:
site:listeningtoladies.com yoursearchterm
As blog posts accumulate over time, that setup will become heavy-handed. A dynamic sidebar blog archive and a tag cloud for tracking genres would do wonders for site usability, as would a search widget and an archive with linkbacks to original posts. But my hope is that all that will come. My sense is that Listening to Ladies is an ongoing project and that they are in the process of updating their work. With a few more robust website archiving techniques, the site will only get better.
I think we can expect great things from the Blair/Wilder pair and encourage you to use their site for your writing and editing soundscapes.
Photos: Elizabeth Blair and Krystee Wilder, © Listening to Ladies, accessed December 8, 2018, http://listeningtoladies.com/.
Nonesuch Editing 