I’m Héloïse Luzzati. I’m a cellist, and the founder and director of La Cité des Compositrices.

I started this project in 2020, after realizing the complete absence of female composers in my musical education. More than ten years ago, like many other musicians, I began to question why women composers were entirely missing from our training. They were absent from our studies, our repertoire, our conservatories—everywhere.

We all began learning an instrument as children, going to lessons in rooms named after Berlioz, Mozart, or Chopin, taking weekly classes. And for those of us who went on to study in higher music schools or pursue professional careers, women composers continued to be absent from our musical education well into our twenties.

It wasn’t a sudden realization; I didn’t wake up one morning thinking, “That’s strange, I’ve never studied a female composer.” It came gradually, between the lines, becoming more and more obvious over time—especially because I had only ever studied the cello with men. Until quite recently, at the Paris Conservatoire, there had never been a female cello professor. That’s worth noting.

Between the ages of 25 and 30, I became increasingly aware of how narrow our musical world was—how we kept playing the same works, always composed by men. Even just a decade ago, there was still a near-total absence of female composers from programming.

To illustrate that absence, there’s a little exercise that always works: ask people around you—friends, neighbours, music lovers or not—to name five composers. Everyone can do it. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t name at least three. But if you ask even a passionate music lover to name five female composers, they pause. If they manage, they take a long time to think: “Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger…”—and then the list stops. And when those names come up, almost no one can name a single piece by them.

This personal realization—that I couldn’t name or recognize the works of female composers—made me want to learn more. So I started reading everything I could, listening to every recording that existed. One key reference was Florence Launay’s excellent book on French women composers, a pioneering work in France.

But in France, unlike in countries such as Germany, there were very few books about women composers. Even five years ago, there wasn’t much available. So I read everything I could find, and the more I researched, the more I realized that many female composers’ names weren’t linked to any identifiable sheet music or recordings. There was nothing to hear, nothing to study—so how could anyone form an opinion about their music?

Instinctively, people assume that if something is forgotten, it’s because it wasn’t good enough. I never believed that. I knew it was an easy, but false, way of thinking. It made me wonder instead: what actually exists out there?

That question led me into a much larger story—one that goes far beyond me. I soon realized that there were countless forgotten female composers. Now, I devote all my time to discovering music. And there isn’t a single week that goes by without a new name surfacing—someone entirely unknown.

Today, in France, only about 6% of the works performed in concerts are written by women. That’s still very little, mostly because of ignorance—simply a lack of shared knowledge.

The mission of La Cité des Compositrices is to change that, in our own way—to add our small contribution to the rebuilding of this collective understanding.

Our work begins with identifying scores, digitizing them, decoding them, and deciding which versions to bring back to life. Of course, among the thousands of scores I’ve digitized in the past few years, we can’t possibly promote them all—there are simply too many.

The next challenge is how to make them known. That’s why we created a video channel, which now has about 150 videos. It offers easy access—for music lovers, non-musicians, children, adults—to music, stories, and the lives of female composers. Many of these videos tell their personal histories, which I think is essential because it reconnects them to our shared human story.

We also founded a record label called La Boîte à Pépites, which produces monographic albums. I feel very strongly about this approach. A monograph allows us to properly rehabilitate a composer’s full body of work. If we only recorded one or two pieces hidden in the middle of a mixed album, they would likely go unnoticed.

We’re also launching our own sheet music publishing house, an essential step to bring forgotten scores back into circulation.

And then there’s the question of programming. If more works are discovered, recorded, and published, then naturally they can be programmed more often. That’s where another part of our work comes in—collaborating with large, medium, and small institutions to help them reflect on programming choices: which works to include, how to integrate them into concerts, whether to present mixed programs or all-female ones. For now, all-female programs still serve a purpose, even if we hope that one day they’ll no longer be necessary.

To take an active role in programming, I created Le Festival Intemporel five years ago. It’s a space of complete artistic freedom, where we can take risks—reviving works that have probably never been played before, and giving them a chance. People can hear them for the first time, and we as musicians can experience them live on stage.

It’s rare for musicians to play works they can’t listen to beforehand—apart from contemporary music, that almost never happens. If you asked 50 musicians, “Have you ever played a piece you couldn’t listen to first?”—I think 98% would say no. Nowadays, almost everything we perform is available online somewhere.

But in our festival, many of the pieces we play can’t be heard anywhere else. From this process, certain works stand out—those are the ones we then propose to institutions like the Philharmonie de Paris or other concert halls, saying, “I know, you can’t hear it—it hasn’t been recorded—but it really needs to be played. This piece deserves to be heard.”

It’s a long, long process. But I have full confidence that over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, the numbers will change—and so will our perception of these forgotten works.