The women missing from music

Women have been writing music for centuries. Why do we know so few of them today? This hour, TED speakers explore the role of women in music history and how we can remember their contributions. Guests include opera singer and activist Gabriella Di Laccio and Nadya Tolokonnikova, a Russian artist and founder of Pussy Riot. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  And 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. This is Gabriela Delaccio. She is a classical singer here, performing an opera by Vivaldi.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  I always sung since I was a kid, very young. I'm Brazilian, so I grew up in the south of Brazil and singing. It's a big part of the culture, school, church, at home. 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, what that music did to me and singing in harmony. So I started to imitate them in my living room. And that's how I started to fall in love with classical music.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Gabriela has found that classical music is a language that anyone can understand.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  It 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, is really priceless.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  When you were younger, who were your favorites? Who were the composers that you thought were just the best?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  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 the music I knew much broader. But of course, they were all men.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Did that even occur to you, that they were men? Or were you just kind of like?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  No, I simply accepted women didn't write music. But I wasn't, like, thinking about it. It was, I didn't question. Let's put it this way, I didn't question. It was much later that I even thought about it.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  In South Bank, on the weekends, under the bridge, they have these sort of outside market with lots of things, secondhand books or art. 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 it said, "The International Encyclopedia of Women Composers." Publication done in the 80s. And I was like, what? And then I looked, opened the book, and it said, "This man had listed 6,000 women composers

• 4:40Speaker 03

  in the history of music, from medieval, pre-medieval times to until 1984." Anyway, I bought the book, took it home, and really 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. 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.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  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 started to, you know, look for their music, their names. And then I discovered one story, and another story, and another story. And then it became a joke in our house, because my husband is an engineer, and, you know, he loves music, but he'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? La, la, la, la. And then he was like, wow, so interesting this. And I was like that for, I think, almost a year.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  So it wasn't just you?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  No, nobody knew. And I was like, what's going on? And this makes absolutely no sense.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  I did get angry. But I think my husband got angry too, because I think he got sick of her listening to me. And one day, he said to me, looks very nice, you're telling me all these stories. Nothing's gonna happen, you know? Are you gonna do something about it, or what? So I tell you what I did. I created a tiny website, and I listed 4,000 women. The ones I could find, I 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.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I 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 have the power to share this music, and they already have an audience. Imagine if they would play this music. So I counted, it 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.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  And then, published this website on International Women's Day 2018. It kind of became a 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.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Who decides which music 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 Delaccio's work over the past decade, as her website has turned from a side project into a nonprofit, 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 Delaccio on the forgotten stories in music's history, and how this affects the ways AI could shape its future.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  But let's start with the basics. At the risk of sounding completely naive, can we just go back? And can I ask you the obvious question, which is, why don't we know about all of these female composers?

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Oh, that's the 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. And then we have, we go to, I don't know, Baroque, period, and again, you start 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 they their voices carried on, but there were not many. You

• 10:12Speaker 03

  have incredible stories, you know, if you think like the Medici's in Florence, one of the most high paid musicians at the court of the Medici's was Francesca Caccini. And she was a woman, daughter of a very famous Baroque composer. And because she was producing music for the Medici's, a lot of the music didn't survive because it was not published by a proper publishing house. She's known to be the woman, first woman who wrote an opera, but she wrote hundreds of pieces who simply disappeared. So we have a problem of record, why we didn't keep record of these women. And then moving through through the

• 10:55Speaker 03

  ages, I think a lot of the fault as well, and not totally, but you know, 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's the man who compiled 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.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  They would not keep. And this is, we're talking like, I don't know, the 70s or the 80s. It's not, it's not medieval times. So, so we have this problem, the erasure of the works, which we will never know, which is really sad. That creates, creates an unconscious bias on all of us. Because we grow up not knowing, and we grow up just accepting, like I did, thinking, oh, but yeah, women didn't have access. That's why they didn't create.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Okay. So when you first started your website, did, 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?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Yes. I never 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 from all over the world start writing to me. And they just, I'm sorry, I get very emotional when I tell that story. They just said, thank you so much. I'm a composer. Can you add me to your list? That changed my life. That I remember that day forever because I remember I published, and you know, I didn't know how to do a website. So it took me forever to sort of, oh my God. It was a lot of work for something I didn't even know. And I, and I just felt

• 12:55Speaker 03

  like I did my part. At least now I can relax. Little did I know, it was only this beginning.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  In a moment, Gabriela Delaccio shares some of this forgotten music, including a lullaby that was found buried underground. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 15:05Speaker 01

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, the women missing from music. We were just talking to Gabriela Delaccio, a classical singer and founder of the Donae Foundation, which has built a massive database of female composers who'd largely been left out of music history. These days, she spends her time combing through records, searching for more women who should be added to this list.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  I have the luxury now of access to online libraries and access to musicologists all over the world, and access to people who are doing this and sometimes write to me and say, oh, my God, I'm studying, I'm researching this composer, and here's her file, and here is our music. But a lot of this music is still in manuscripts, in libraries, in boxes. Sometimes, you know, the, the most heartbroken things that happen are when I meet a family of a composer who died, and they have all this music. And I look at this music, and they love, they, they don't know what to do with it. They don't have

• 16:18Speaker 03

  money to publish. They don't know if the music is good.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  So at the moment, so the, the big list of women composers is going through a massive update. So we have found more than 18,000 now. I think the, the website currently has over 10,000. And we're just making sure that all the data is correct and publishing them as we go with volunteers all over the world. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful project.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  So let's talk about some of the women you've discovered in the past decade. Are there any that particularly stand out to you?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. One of the first ones was Ilse, Ilse Weber. Because one thing that became very clear to me is like, when people were asking me, they were asking me like, oh, but how do you decide if a composer is good enough to join your website? How many compositions? So they started asking me kind of practical questions. And, and I found very difficult to answer this question, because Ilse Weber was not a, a big orchestral, you know, massive pieces of work composer. She was, you know, a Czech Jewish writer, poet,

• 17:44Speaker 03

  composer who wrote songs, plays for, for children.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  She was imprisoned in the ghetto of Terezinstadt during the Second World War. And as she was there, she wrote songs for the children and the elderly who were at the hospital. Sadly, she was sent to Auschwitz and with her son, and she died there. But her husband, just before they left the ghetto, he buried her compositions and her poems. And after the war, they found her, her book.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And

• 18:32Speaker 01

  It's incredible story.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yes, I have, I read the book that has all her poems and the letters she sent to, I think it was the grandmother of her other son. She managed to send one son to Sweden on the Kindertransport. So one son survived. And, and all those letters. And I found this lullaby, and then she wrote this lullaby. And, and it really moved me to another level.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what we're listening to is actually you singing this lullaby called Vigila. It is lovely, but also chilling.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And no, you know, she was not only one. There are so many people during that period who did everything they could to make everybody's lives easier around them, you know, with art. And if you go to Prague, you see the, the Jewish museum. Oh, my God, it's all these unspoken heroes who, who, who used art to, you know, make their lives better somehow. And Ilse's story really touched me. And then I decided, you know, I don't care if a woman wrote one piece of music, if I can find the, the record is going on,

• 19:57Speaker 03

  on the website, is going on the list, because I believe we must recognize for what they did. Another one was Mariana Martinez. She played with Mozart. Apparently, he played her music. I never heard her name. And I was really sort of, what? What's going on? Then her music is beautiful, you know, it has the same sort of, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna compare, of course, with Mozart. Mozart is a massive genius. But, you know, I should have known her name.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  And somehow, you know, we know Mozart. She disappeared. And we now know, but she still has a lot of music. And that's another problem. So a lot of her music is still unpublished.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  And here is a very particular sort of practical information. If you want to listen to a symphony on Spotify, before you listen, that symphony needs to be recorded. For that symphony to be recorded, you need to have the music published.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  If you don't publish the music, you all you have is a manuscript of the composer's handwriting. So imagine Shakespeare's manuscript of all his plays. Imagine if you had to read his handwriting. So musicians and an orchestra, they don't, they're not going to do that. They are paid by session, by hour, by rehearsal. They need a very good copy in front of them of the music they're going to record. And this is another problem because we don't care as much about these women. So a lot of this music is still unpublished. And because it's not properly published, it's not recorded. And then we have 1,500 recordings of Beethoven symphonies,

• 22:02Speaker 03

  of the same ones, but maybe one of a woman composer in comparison.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  This other woman that you mentioned in your TED Talk, Florence Price, she the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Tell me more about her.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  So Florence Price, huge composer, you know. And normally when people also think of women composers, they, they think they, oh, they wrote songs or smaller. No, huge pieces for orchestra and also chamber music.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Very prolific woman. And then very respected as well amongst her peers in the area and all her colleagues. But then after her death somehow, God, forgotten.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  What year was that around when?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  She died 1953.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  And then, you know, years later, I think it was 2009, they found in a house in Illinois, some of her manuscript, again, who that almost disappeared. So all that music was rediscovered. And I think that was a good, a great thing because it was like a new rediscovery of a composer who always existed, who was not new at all. But it just brought the whole conversation back to life. And I think she now has more recordings because of all this interest, deserved interest that, you know. But how do we know how many more like her? We still don't know.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like the sheer will that someone like Florence Price must have had living in the United States, Jim Crow laws, black woman, to become, to compose symphonies.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Can you imagine?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  And what strikes me is like, why are we never seen a movie about her? Florence Price, for example?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  You know, there are stories. Oh, my God, you just need to look for it. Because I, I'm doing a PhD now about music activism, the art of activism. I, I don't like to preach. Preaching is really tiring. Activism is tiring. Anybody who is an activist will know. You don't have a holiday. Every time I go to a concert and I'm going to enjoy myself. And then my husband goes, oh, my God, it's only dead white men on the program.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And you're like, oh, yeah, that again.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  And then I go, oh, my God, can I just, can I just enjoy? But, you know.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  And you're making an interesting point, which is that that's not to say that those, you know, just because they've gotten more PR, these, these, you know, obviously Mozart, Beethoven, they're geniuses for sure. But there could also have been many other female geniuses coming up at the same time, right?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  It's not about taking people off the list.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  It's putting more people on the list. I always say this, this is not about, you know, oh, we need to play less Mozart. No, no, I love Mozart. My gosh, I love Mozart, I love Beethoven, I love Verdi. I love the modern composers. Honestly, it's about making the list bigger. Because we own it, own it to all of us. Also to, to allow everybody who goes to a concert to see themselves on stage, to hear different voices, to hear composers from different backgrounds and ethnicities and different countries. And I think classical music still sometimes a bit, I don't know, afraid of opening the gates.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  I can't speak because I'm not an artistic director for those organizations. But anyways, I guess it's an opportunity. It's a huge opportunity.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's making me think of one of the most famous songwriters and performers who died recently, Dolly Parton, who, you know, really started out as a songwriter and composer and then found a way to make people look at her by being just an extraordinary spectacle and showwoman. And a lot of people, I think, don't even realize how many songs they hear performed by other artists that were written by her. Because that part of her profession was not quite as, as celebrated.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  What an iconic woman, so intelligent. So honestly, you have to, so much, I could not believe when she died. I thought she would not die ever. But what a, what a legacy, what an inspiration. But if anything, you know, she made sure she was not invisible.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  That's for sure. And she just played the patriarchy, didn't she? Just, she was like, fine, you want to look at me? Look at me. At least you're looking at me. I am not invisible, right?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And people, oh, my God, there's so many interviews when people were asking her, oh, why do you do this? Why do you dress like this? And then she tells the story that when she was a child, she, she went to town once and there was the town hooker that she thought the woman was beautiful. She thought, when I grow up, I'm going to be like her. And her mom told her like, oh, she's just trash. And then she said, oh, I thought trash was a good word.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  I love it. No, I mean, yes, we should all be more Dolly.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's reclaiming that space though, isn't it? And it's like, well, however you need me to do it, I will do it. And presumably that builds on the next one. I, I did want to ask you, like, I'm wondering if you feel that there's more hope in the progress for women in the pop field? Because I was just looking at, you know, the numbers, like the Billboard, you know, Hot 100 sort of charts. And from what I, I see, it, it has improved. Like, it's gone up from about 22%, 23% women on those charts. And now it's around like a third or so. Is that, is that a sign of progress?

• 29:08Speaker 03

  It's definitely a sign of progress, absolutely. And my focus is more on the creation of music. So we definitely see more performers. And women were always performers on stage. But we, when, when, when I count, for example, we count, I count the women who write music. And I think on that front is never as good, but it's way better. It's way better. We have like so much more women to look up to and the role models who can inspire the future generations. But the music industry is still very male. It's still, you, you, you hear from, from, from different experiences,

• 29:54Speaker 03

  still things happening that are not the best for women. And I guess.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Why do we have to be happy with 30%, I guess?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  In a way. But we need, we need to certainly acknowledge all, all the progress that has been happening and, you know, ride on it and then just, you know, make it better and faster and easier for the women today. So they don't have to experience the invisibility or, you know, the, this fear of not having your talent recognized or seen.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Can you describe that moment after you have found a, a piece of, a score that has been hidden away? And then you translate the music to an arrangement and, and you perform it? What is, I mean, I know how I feel when I hear Mozart performed. I feel almost comforted. It's so familiar to me and so beautiful. But something from, I don't know, the same period that has never been heard or hasn't been heard in centuries. What does that feel like to perform it? And how does the audience react?

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Magic, magical.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Of course, the pieces I choose are pieces I want to share, you know, that I personally love as a singer. And normally there is a story, of course. And so it's a, it's a, it's a journey that I live by myself first. And then the sharing with the audience is, then I treat it as really my job to make justice to what I'm trying to do. How can I make that experience the most magical for them? And, and that's a job between, how do I present the music? I'll always sing by memory because I want to be connected with the audience

• 32:09Speaker 03

  when I sing. And then I need to trust the music and let them experience. And, you know, not everybody will love all the pieces, of course. And one thing we must remember, when you say Mozart, oh, when you listen to Mozart, you feel, we feel the same. But we do that because we listen to him thousands of times. We have the chance to have familiarity. These women don't get that privilege.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  So familiarity is needed. We need to play things a few times to allow us to even, oh, yeah, I like that. So I think it's, it's, it's a bit magical for me when I, I get to do that. But it's a big responsibility because I want to do it well.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  When we come back, Gabriela Delaccio on the future of music. How AI is changing music composition? And how the history of music may shape what we'll hear? I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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• 34:18Speaker 01

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we're talking to singer and activist Gabriella Delaccio about the oft-forgotten or even lost contributions of female composers to music. Today, AI is a hot topic in the music industry. Well, for all of us, right? And put simply, the technology learns by studying compositions and then remixing those ideas to create new compositions. Gabriela remembers when it dawned on her that the poor representation of women in the history of music will certainly be a problem for its future.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  I strongly feel that writing art or creating art belongs to humans. But we can't stop AI right now. I actually was in a, in a completely different event and I was watching a panel conversation about AI. And, and then there was a woman, an AI specialist, talking about Africa. And she said something like, a huge portion of Africa doesn't even have internet. So AI is generating a lot of data and is not taking into consideration a, a whole continent. And the whole African continent is not, you know, AI doesn't know much about it. And I remember thinking about that and I thought, wow.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  And then I connected that to music because I was doing this research. I, you know, I, I like numbers. So I've been doing this research, the classical music research for the foundation. And I also follow other foundations that do pop music and film music research. So I know the numbers. So I went like, hold on a minute. That's the same in music. So AI is generating art, is generating music. The whole thing with music is, is really messy because AI creates new music. It doesn't pay any royalties to the people whose music is using it to create. It's, it's messy. But there is another part, which is also, majority of the music recorded is, it has a male imprint.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And I think we deserve to have a more fair imprint of voices. So at least the music generated has more data to generate future music. Otherwise, we're just gonna replicate this erasure of the women's voices at, you know, much faster scale. So if you're generating music based on, let's say, 85% catalog that has male imprint, so exponentially you're gonna regenerate more music, which is little by little gonna be deleting the female imprint of our voices.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  And, and I think we, we can do better than that. And that's, that's why my, and it's quite funny that when I did the talk, and now still when I talk about this, many people say to me, oh, I never thought about that. Which is interesting because the day I thought about that, I remember exactly what it was, how it was. And I, and I felt like, wow, no, no, no, we can't let that happen. We, we must record this music.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Part of me is wondering, like, what if you created your own AI model that was trained only on female composers and compared its output to the more traditional AI music models that are majority trained on male composers?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, Manoush, are you offering? Can you?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  No, I can't. I don't know how to do that, but you must know how to do that. I just be curious how different they would be, you know?

• 38:13Speaker 03

  I will be so curious. And this is it. This is my open invitation to all tech companies. I want to build that. Manoush gave me the idea. No, I mean, how, how amazing would that be?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I don't think it would be that hard.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  No, I don't think it'll be that hard. I just need the money to do it. I don't think it's that hard, but you need to, yeah. It, it, it would be a great experiment, I must say.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  It would be a great experiment. That'd be interesting. I mean, it, it, it brings up so many questions too, which is like, is there something? Just, you know, we should be encouraging more real human women to be writing music as opposed to getting machines to write it. On the other hand, as you say, this is the future and it is happening. And so why not try to improve on it while we still can?

• 39:00Speaker 03

  I think, I think both things can happen.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  I, you know, I, I, I can't, I think all of us, nobody can predict what's gonna happen. We are living very interesting times. And I'm not gonna predict, but I think both things must happen. We must continue to support living artists because I think in 10 years' time, we will crave live music done by people. I, I know I will. I will want to be in a room singing for 10 people with me, live, making mistakes. You know, I will want to do that. I will still want to go to a live concert. So we must, we must nourish the artists today. We must, we, we really must.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  And then, but we also, we can't stop the machine. I, I, I'm not gonna try to stop it. But I think it's so exciting to imagine this, this world where we can have a much more complete record. Because this is gonna help the living musicians as well. It's gonna help the people who are making music now to record. It's gonna help people researching the music. It's gonna help the publishers who are publishing this music. It's a, it's a whole ecosystem of humans who will be involved together with AI. And I think that's beautiful and exciting. I know I can't do it alone. I don't think I'm supposed to.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  But I really hope that people can hear this and think, whoa, that's nice. I want to be part of that. So maybe find a way of doing it together, I guess.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Even just listening to more

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  music composed by women, I suppose?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Yes, that's number one. Discover, find, listen, share, be amazed. I think everything starts with curiosity.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  That was Gabriela Delaccio, founder of the Donne Foundation. You can listen to the works of hundreds of female composers at donne, D-O-N-N-E-uk.org. And you can see Gabriela singing in her TED Talk at ted.com.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  So Gabriela's work reminded me of another TED speaker, one whose music has been actively suppressed by a government that has tried to silence her.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Nadia Tolokonnikova is a member of the feminist punk music group Pussy Riot that was imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the government and using music as a tool for resistance.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Here she is explaining how she has made sure she gets heard from the TED stage in 2023.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  It's August 17, 2012. I'm handcuffed and standing for four long hours while the judge is reading my sentence.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  You're in a small cage and you're surrounded by 10 prison guards in balaclavas.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  I'm stripped down from my humanity. I'm reduced to being just a prisoner. I'm 22 and I smell like prison. And as I'm standing here handcuffed behind the bars, I'm thinking to myself, can one person change the world? Is it even worth trying? Or am I just setting myself up for failure? Will I be able to achieve my dreams? Or I'm going to be inevitably smashed by the system?

• 43:02Speaker 05

  What is my crime exactly?

• 43:05Speaker 05

  I sang a song. Virgin Mary, please get rid of Putin. Me and four other members of Pussy Riot came to Cathedral of Christ the Savior and we preached to the people of Russia from the holy place that for thousands of years was reserved only for the male preachers and in particular for the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who today sends Russians to kill and to die in Ukraine. We sang our song on the February 21 of 2012. We did it in response to Putin's announcement

• 43:48Speaker 05

  that he wants to rule Russia pretty much indefinitely. I dropped everything I was doing and I promised to myself that I'm going to dedicate my life to resistance.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  I felt deep inside me that Putin equals death, medieval torture, knife in the back, stagnation, new dark ages for Russia.

• 44:19Speaker 05

  To resist, we used our loud voices, bright ski masks, dresses, courage, commitment, and performance art. We would show up in public places, unannounced, guerrilla style, no permits at all, and perform, preach. We performed in government buildings, squares, shopping malls, and we would get arrested almost every single day, get out, and go back to action. Our job was to show the people of Russia that resisting is indeed an option.

• 45:06Speaker 05

  The supreme sacred holy rule in Putin's Russia is to remain afraid.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  We decided to break this rule.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  By breaking this rule, we disrupted the game as such. We exposed it as a mere game.

• 45:27Speaker 05

  We said that the emperor is naked.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Did we achieve what we wanted?

• 45:39Speaker 05

  As I'm standing behind the bars handcuffed, I'm asking myself this question, yes and no. As I said in my closing statement,

• 45:50Speaker 05

  we are behind the prison bars, but we are freer than people who are prosecuting us because we can say whatever we want to say and they can say only things that their government censorship allows them to say.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Despite of the global movement in support of Pussy Riot, we got convicted to two years in jail.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  The hell was in front of me.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  But even in the darkest moments, I knew that our fight is not over.

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Two years later, I will get out of jail and I will meet thousands of young Russians who will tell me that they got inspired by our fight. Over the next 10 years, Pussy Riot will build infrastructure, tools, and network for effective resistance. In 2014, we started MediaZona. It's a unique in Russia, free of censorship, independent media outlet. In 2022, we raised $7 million in two days for Ukraine.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  When reproductive rights became under attack in the United States, we raised close to $1 million for Planned Parenthood. We started Unicorn DAO and raised $2 million to collect art made by women and non-binary people.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  I really wish I could tell all of this to a 22-year-old version of myself that is standing behind the bars, separated from her family, not knowing what's going to happen next.

• 47:51Speaker 05

  Much work remains to be done. My friends and family are getting beaten, imprisoned, poisoned, tortured, and murdered back home.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  In March 2023, I was put on Russia's most-wanted list. I'm facing new criminal charges for the art I made.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Why? Because I said that the emperor is naked and because he is in fact naked, he's scared of it.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  We shattered the world of appearances and we said that living a lie is indeed living a lie and it's dangerous for any dictatorship.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  The reason why I became a threat to the system, not because of any actual physical power that I have, but because courage is contagious. And any act of speaking the truth can cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness. And we all have this power.

• 49:10Speaker 05

  It's a moral act to use this power.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  You may or may not achieve the results that you wanted, but there is eternal beauty in

• 49:25Speaker 05

  trying to find truth, in risking everything you've got for what's right. Stop calculating your profits

• 49:36Speaker 05

  and just taking a leap of faith. Courage is an ability to act in the face of fear. And some of us

• 49:50Speaker 05

  have chosen to live courageously. For some of us, it's not a choice. It's a matter of survival, like for our Ukrainian friends.

• 50:02Speaker 05

  Yesterday, my friend, my colleague and comrade, Vladimir Koramurzev, was sentenced to 25 years in jail for publicly condemning the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's regime. He said in his closing statement, "I know that a day will come when the darkness engulfing our country will dissipate. This day will come as inevitably as spring comes to replace even the frostiest winter." And I'll finish my speech with words of 22-year-old version of myself.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  I said in my closing statement, "Passion, openness, and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, cunning and contrived decency that conceals crimes."

• 51:02Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  That was Nadia Tolokonnikova, a member of the resistance group and band Pussy Riot. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner White with help from Harsha Nahada. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkempour and me. Our production staff also includes Katie Monteleone, James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier, Avery Keatley, and Fiona Guerin. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Sal Khan, Logan McLeod-Davda, Helen Walters, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Balarezzo.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.