Eliza's Artist Spotlight

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Life as a freelancer is thrilling. I get to choose who I play with and what I play every week. I love that spontaneity, and I need that for me; my creativity keeps me on my toes, keeps me exploring this enormous world that we're a part of in music.

  
With my project, "March of the Women", I'm constantly discovering new composers and music that I’ve never heard performed. It's so inspiring to find all of these thousands of names of composers that have been just as prolific as the big composers that we are all familiar with.

And I think, "Why? Why was this something that we were so incapable of sharing the space with? Why couldn't these women be part of the world of music back in the day?"

They were, but thanks to history, thanks to society, whatever it was, their music was sidestepped. There are so many wonderful organizations around the world now that are bringing light to these composers, and sharing in that space again, as it should have been when they were alive.

Thankfully, there are female composers nowadays writing, thriving in this community that are winning incredible prizes for their art and getting significant commissions and platforms to share their creativity.

I would love the music community to ask this question more: “Can you see what's missing?” and see how we can best celebrate that component. In my teaching studio when selecting new repertoire with students I’ll ask, "Can you see what's missing?" They'll send me a program, and I ask them to put all those names in a table, and to write down the composer’s gender, nationality, what part of the world they're from or living in now, and their rough dates of born (and death if appropriate), and to see if there’s anything missing.

I'm all for celebrating familiar composers, but as long as we also have that balance. If it is too heavy in one realm, the other composers are losing out on an opportunity. And it's almost like the responsibility to celebrate those other composers shifts to be ‘someone else’s problem’.

Imagine if every person in the world said, "I'm going to make it my mission to celebrate this composer, to celebrate this cause". All of a sudden, everyone would have a platform. It comes back to connection, we need to have that. 

—Eliza Shephard