The women missing from music

TED Radio Hour

This episode explores the systematic erasure of women from music history and the active efforts to reclaim their legacies. Through the work

Key takeaways

• Gabriela DiLaccio discovered an encyclopedia listing 6,000 women composers, prompting her to found the Donne Foundation.
• Research shows only 2.3% of the repertoire played by the world's top 15 orchestras is written by women.

Main topics

• Rediscovering women composers
• The Donne Foundation mission

Notable quotes

Women were always creating. Their music was there, but what disappeared somehow was our memory.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for listeners to actively seek

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This message comes from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, learn more at nprwineclub.org. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Speaker 8 (0:15) This... is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You Speaker 5 (0:35) just don't know what you're going to find. Speaker 8 (0:36) Challenge you. We Speaker 5 (0:37) truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And Speaker 8 (0:40) even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the women missing from music. Speaker 8 (1:02) This is Gabriela DiLaccio. She is a classical singer here performing an opera by Vivaldi. Speaker 6 (1:15) I sang since I was a kid, very young. I'm Brazilian, so I grew up in the south of Brazil and singing is a big part of the culture. School, church, at home. Speaker 6 (1:30) But it was not until I was, I guess, 11 or 12 that I started to listen to opera on TV and classical music. And I loved it so much. Speaker 6 (1:42) What that music did to me and singing in harmony. So I started to imitate Speaker 7 (1:47) them in my living room. And that's how I started to fall in love with classical music. Gabriela Speaker 8 (1:57) has found that classical music is a language that anyone can understand. It Speaker 7 (2:03) can touch so many people. And I think that was why I wanted this to be my career, because to be able to see what, just by singing, I could move people and touch people in a way that I never imagined. It's really priceless. Speaker 2 (2:22) When you were younger, who were your favorites? Who were the composers that you thought were just the best? Speaker 7 (2:30) Mozart was the composer who I was completely obsessed with because, you know, I watched the movie Amadeus, I guess, as well. But Beethoven as well, you know, I grew up in a small town. I didn't have access to going to concerts all the time, but... Eventually, I started to, when I was a teenager, I started to go and watch the symphony orchestra every week. And I started to... make my the the music I knew Speaker 3 (3:05) much broader but of course they were all men Speaker 3 (3:10) Did Speaker 6 (3:10) that even occur to you that they were men or were you just kind of like... No, I simply accepted women didn't write music. But I wasn't like thinking about Speaker 7 (3:19) it. It was, I didn't question. Let's put it this way. I didn't question. Speaker 6 (3:24) It Speaker 7 (3:25) was much later that I even thought Speaker 8 (3:27) about it. As an adult... Gabriela left Brazil to continue her education. She moved to London, where she studied Baroque music and opera at the Royal College of Music. And she started performing professionally in operas and as a soloist, singing major works by the classical greats like Bach, Puccini, and Mozart. But her career changed forever one day in 2016, when she was browsing in a secondhand book market in London. in South Bank Speaker 6 (3:59) on the weekends under the bridge. They Speaker 3 (4:02) have these sort of outside market with lots of things, secondhand books or art. And I was walking there and I'm very curious. I love books. And I found this encyclopedia. It looked like two big blue books, art cover. And he said, the International Encyclopedia of Women Composers. Speaker 6 (4:27) publication done in the 80s and I was like what? And then I opened Speaker 3 (4:34) the book and it said this man had listed 6,000 women composers in the history of music from medieval, pre-medieval times to until 1984. Anyway, I bought the book, took it home and really Speaker 7 (4:52) shocked, felt... Okay, this is embarrassing. I am the most ignorant singer in the whole world. I will not tell anyone. I probably missed a lesson. I don't know, the day they taught about women composers at the Royal College of Music. Speaker 6 (5:10) And the first thought that crossed my mind was this. Oh, I bet this is just a big list. It doesn't mean their work was any good. And then I was immediately shocked with my own thought because I went, what? Why did I think that? So I did what I thought at least my curiosity and these women deserved. And I Speaker 7 (5:34) started to, you know, look for their music, their names. And then I discovered one story and another story and another story. And then he became a joke in our house because my husband is an engineer and, you know, he loves music, but it's not his field. And every morning at breakfast, I would tell him, oh, my God, you must listen to this. Do you know this woman? And then he was like, wow, so interesting this. Speaker 6 (5:59) And Speaker 7 (5:59) I was Speaker 6 (6:00) like that for, I think, almost a year. And then every rehearsal, you know, I was singing, I was performing. So I was talking to colleagues. And I said, oh, do you know that composer? No. Conductor. Oh, do you know that? No, never heard of it. But how about that one? No, no. So it wasn't just you? No, nobody knew. And I was like, what's going on? And this makes absolutely no Speaker 8 (6:25) sense. The more Gabriela dug in, the more confused she got. How could this vast archive of music written by women just go unnoticed for so long? Eventually, her confusion turned to anger. Speaker 7 (6:41) I did get angry, but I think my husband got angry too because I think he got sick of listening Speaker 6 (6:47) to me. And one day he said to me, looks very nice, you're telling me all these stories. Nothing is going to happen, you know. Are you going to do something about it or what? So I tell you what Speaker 3 (7:00) I did. I created a tiny website and I listed 4,000 women, the ones I could find that had links online. And I decided to call the website Donne, which means women in Italian. And then I just interviewed living composers who are here in London, including Rachel Portman, who's the first woman who ever won an Oscar as a composer. We did little interviews and posted on YouTube. And as a curiosity extra piece, I decided to look into the top 15 orchestras in the world. And I decided to count what they were playing because I thought. These orchestras, they Speaker 6 (7:42) have the power to share this music and they already have an audience. Imagine if they would play this music. So I counted, it Speaker 3 (7:50) took me months, and I published a tiny infographic and it said only 2.3 % of these orchestras, the music these orchestras played, was written by women. That was it. And then... published this website on International Women's Day 2018. Speaker 3 (8:11) It kind of became a Speaker 7 (8:12) mission to rescue missing voices for our future, you know, because at the end of the day, women were always creating. Their music was there, but what disappeared somehow was our memory. Speaker 7 (8:28) Who decides which music Speaker 8 (8:30) is preserved for generations to come? And how can we unearth that missing half of music history? These questions have been the focus of Gabriela DiLaccio's work over the past decade, as her website has turned from a side project into a non-profit, the Donne Foundation, which has now built a massive database of women composers. documenting their contributions and advocating for equal opportunities for women throughout the music industry. So on the show today, a conversation with singer-turned-historian Gabriela DiLaccio on the forgotten stories in music's history and how this affects the ways AI could shape its future. But let's start with the basics. Speaker 2 (9:15) At the risk of sounding completely naive, can we just go back and... And can I ask you the obvious question, which is why don't we know about all of these female composers? Speaker 3 (9:28) Oh, that's a million dollar question. And I think we start with initially women didn't have the same access to education. They were considered to be less than men. So whatever they produced perhaps was not even registered. Speaker 7 (9:48) And then we have, we go to, I don't know, Baroque period. Speaker 6 (9:52) And again, you start Speaker 3 (9:55) to see more women and you start even to see women who are clever to register their work and to publish their work, to make sure their voices carried on. There were not many. You have incredible stories. You know, if you think like the Medicis in Florence, one of the most high paid musician at the court of the Medicis was Francesca Caccini. And she was a woman, daughter of a very famous Baroque composer. And because she was producing music for the Medicis, a lot of music didn't survive because it was not published by. proper publishing house. She's known to be the first woman who wrote an opera, but Speaker 6 (10:45) she wrote hundreds of pieces who simply disappeared. So Speaker 3 (10:49) we have a problem of record, why we didn't keep record of these women. And then moving through the ages, I think a lot of the fault as well, and not totally, but who was writing the history books? A lot of men were in charge, I guess, and perhaps they didn't think. We should keep this. One story which is great from the encyclopedia, this man, Aaron Cohen, who is the man who compilated all these women, it was his passion work. And he tells on the encyclopedia introduction that when he would go back to a country after a year or two to check the new women composers, all the ones who were there before had been deleted. They would not keep. And this is, we're talking like, I don't know, the 70s or the 80s. It's not medieval times. So we have this problem, the erasure of the works, which we will never know, which is really sad. That creates an unconscious bias on all of us because we grow up not knowing and we grow up just accepting Speaker 6 (11:57) like I did, thinking, oh, but yeah, women didn't have access. That's why they didn't create. Speaker 8 (12:03) Okay, so when you first started your website, did you know that this was going to be what you would dedicate your life to? Or did you think, okay, I've made these women's names known to the world. I'll just go back to singing. Yes. Speaker 6 (12:16) I never Speaker 7 (12:17) stopped singing, but I thought, okay, now I've done that. It will take a life of its own and it's there. And then women