Overview of The women missing from music
This TED Radio Hour episode from NPR follows classical singer Gabriela Di Laccio, who became a music historian and advocate after discovering how many women composers have been erased from the classical canon. What began as a personal curiosity turned into the Donne Foundation, a growing global effort to document, publish, and perform music by women — and to challenge the bias baked into music history, concert programming, and even AI-generated music.
Why women composers were left out
Gabriela explains that women’s absence from music history was not due to lack of talent, but a mix of structural barriers and erasure:
- Women had less access to formal musical education.
- Their work was often not published or preserved.
- History books and institutions were largely controlled by men.
- Even in the 20th century, women composers were still being deleted from reference works.
A striking example comes from an encyclopedia compiled in the 1980s, where the author found that names of women composers had literally disappeared when he revisited countries to update the list.
Gabriela Di Laccio’s turning point
While browsing a second-hand book market in London, Gabriela found an encyclopedia listing thousands of women composers. That discovery changed her life.
What she did next:
- Built a small website listing women composers she could find online.
- Interviewed living women composers, including Rachel Portman.
- Tracked how little of the repertoire performed by major orchestras was written by women.
- Turned the project into the Donne Foundation, now a major database and advocacy effort.
One of her early findings: only 2.3% of works performed by the top 15 orchestras in the world were written by women.
Composers and stories that stood out
The episode highlights several women whose music and lives had been overlooked:
Ilse Weber
- Czech Jewish writer, poet, and composer.
- Wrote songs and lullabies for children and patients in Theresienstadt.
- Her husband buried her manuscripts before deportation; they were later recovered.
- Gabriela sings one of her lullabies, making the loss and beauty of the music especially powerful.
Francesca Caccini
- A Baroque composer associated with the Medici court.
- Often cited as the first woman to write an opera.
- Many of her works were lost because they were never properly published.
Mariana Martínez
- Performed alongside Mozart and was admired in her time.
- Despite her talent, her name and music faded from public memory.
Florence Price
- The first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra.
- Her manuscripts were rediscovered in 2009.
- Her story underscores how racism and sexism compounded the erasure of women’s work.
The bigger problem: recording, publishing, and memory
Gabriela makes a practical point: if music isn’t published, it usually isn’t recorded; if it isn’t recorded, it won’t reach audiences or streaming platforms.
That means:
- Women’s works remain in manuscripts and archives.
- Orchestras default to familiar male composers.
- Listeners never develop familiarity with women’s repertoire.
- The cycle of invisibility continues.
Her argument is not to remove Mozart or Beethoven, but to expand the repertoire so concert halls reflect a fuller history of music.
What this means for the future of music and AI
The episode also looks at AI-generated music and the dangers of training future systems on a skewed archive.
Gabriela’s concern:
- If AI learns mostly from male-dominated catalogs, it will reproduce that imbalance at scale.
- Missing women composers from the training data means future music technology will reinforce old erasures.
- A more complete archive would benefit not just history, but also living musicians, publishers, and audiences.
She suggests a future experiment: compare music generated from a women-only composer dataset with models trained on the broader, male-heavy canon.
Main takeaways
- Women have always composed music; the issue is that their work was often ignored, unpublished, or forgotten.
- Gabriela Di Laccio has turned a personal discovery into a major archival and advocacy project.
- Representation matters not only in performance, but in what gets preserved and used as data for the future.
- Expanding musical history is about adding voices, not replacing the classics.
Closing note: music as resistance
The episode ends with a related TED Talk excerpt from Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, whose use of performance and music became an act of political resistance in Russia. Her message echoes the episode’s themes:
- Courage spreads.
- Art can challenge power.
- Speaking the truth through performance can change social consciousness.
Together, the two stories frame music as both cultural memory and a tool for resistance, visibility, and change.