The Mel Bonis Project began with a question:​

​

Where are the women?

 

​In the fall of 2010, I returned to graduate school at Boston University to pursue a master’s degree in music education. I was a professional pianist, singer, and teacher, but I had been away from academic study for several years. Two courses that semester—Philosophy of Music Education and Impressionism in Music—would unexpectedly change the direction of my work.

 

​In my Impressionism course, we studied the music and cultural history of Paris during the Third Republic. As the semester progressed, I kept waiting for the women composers to appear.​ With the exception of a nod to Nadia Boulanger and a reference to Kaija Saariaho (neither French nor of the designated era), they didn't.

 

I already knew the names of a few: Cécile Chaminade, Germaine Tailleferre, Nadia and Lili Boulanger. But as composer after composer was introduced, I began to wonder: Where were the women?​

 

Perhaps, I thought, there simply weren’t many. Perhaps (I was loathe to consider) their music wasn’t very good. Perhaps there was a reason I had never encountered them in my own education as a classical musician. Not wanting to make assumptions, I began to look closer.​

 

A hidden history​

 

My search led me to two books that opened an entirely new world: Christine Géliot’s biography of Mel Bonis and Florence Launay’s Les compositrices en France au XIXe siècle. Both were written in French, and I read them slowly, translating as I went with a dictionary beside me.​ Page by page, a musical history I had never encountered began to unfold. Launay’s research revealed a remarkable number of women who composed, performed, and published music in France during the nineteenth century. From her work I discovered a group of distinguished French women composers whose music belonged naturally within the musical world I was studying. And at the center of my own discovery was Mel Bonis.​

 

I became fascinated by her music and by her life. Bonis had studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where she was a classmate of Claude Debussy and Gabriel Pierné and a student of César Franck and Ernest Guiraud. She composed hundreds of works across many genres, yet her music had largely disappeared from the repertoire.​ Her story raised a question that became central to my thinking:​ Who decides which composers become known?​

 

In 2010, I wrote a paper about Mel Bonis for my Impressionism course, exploring the phenomenon of the “lost” composer and the assumptions we make when a composer disappears from the standard narrative of music history. I became increasingly convinced that absence from the canon could not, by itself, be evidence of a lack of musical worth.​ My research continued after the semester ended. I contacted Christine Géliot, Bonis’s great-granddaughter, biographer, and a professor of piano in France. Through her, I found Florence Launay. Their scholarship became foundational to my understanding of this history.​

 

From a question to a larger history​

 

The following year, I developed these ideas into a paper entitled “Gender Equity in Music Education: Unveiling the Hidden Curriculum.” I examined the ways that choices about whose music is included—or excluded—from educational materials shape what students come to understand about music history. I presented the paper at the Feminist Theory & Music Conference at Arizona State University in 2011. By then, my original question—Where are the women?—had become something larger.​​​​

 

I began to see that simply adding an occasional woman composer to a curriculum was not enough. If students were going to understand women as composers, they needed opportunities to encounter their music as music: to hear it, play it, study it, and perform it. That idea has remained at the heart of the Mel Bonis Project ever since.​

 

Bringing the music into the studio​

 

The next step was to bring this repertoire into my own teaching. In 2013, my students at Giovanna’s Music Studio presented a recital devoted entirely to the music of Mel Bonis. Students of different ages and levels played Bonis’s music alongside arrangements and adaptations I had created for them. It was a small event, but it embodied something important to me: this music did not belong only in a scholarly article or an archival collection. It belonged in the hands of students.​

 

From discovery to performance​

 

My friendship and musical collaboration with cellist Velléda Miragias became another important part of the story. We had become dear friends and performed together while I was an undergraduate student at Boston University in the late 1990s. In September 2018, Velléda and I had an important reunion. We performed Mel Bonis’s Sonata in F Major, Op. 67 for cello and piano at the French Cultural Center in Boston. At the time, the performance was presented as the American premiere of the sonata. The program carried the name The Mel Bonis Project and expressed its purpose simply: to share Bonis’s story and music, along with those of the many other remarkable nineteenth-century French women composers like her.​

 

Velléda has remained alongside me throughout this journey and is a founding member of the Project. In 2021, she helped bring the music to an international audience when she secured an invitation for us to perform the second movement of Bonis’s cello sonata as part of a virtual concert presented by the United Nations Chamber Music Society in partnership with the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations and the International Organisation of La Francophonie. The Project had moved from research, to teaching, to performance—and into an international musical community.​

 

Why the Project exists today​

 

More than a decade after I first asked Where are the women?, the question still matters.​ A young music student can still grow up hearing the words “classical composer” and imagine an old, deceased white man. We can acknowledge women composers in conversation, but if their music remains difficult to find, difficult to teach, and rarely encountered in ordinary musical life, the stereotype remains intact. The solution is not simply to talk about women composers. We need to make their music accessible.​ Teachers should be able to find repertoire for their students. Students should be able to see the faces and learn the stories of women composers. Performers should be able to discover repertoire for the concert stage. Scholars should be able to find reliable resources. Presenters should be able to build programs. And musicians who care about this history should be able to find one another.

 

That is the purpose of the Mel Bonis Project.​

 

We are beginning with nineteenth-century French women composers because their history is extraordinarily rich and because Mel Bonis led me to discover a world of music that was almost entirely absent from my own education as a classical musician.​ But Mel Bonis is not the destination. She is the doorway.​

 

The Project seeks to make the music of these compositrices easier to discover, hear, teach, perform, and study—and ultimately to create a model that can inspire similar work on behalf of women composers from other eras, cultures and countries.​ What began with one question has become an invitation:​

 

Be curious. Look again. Listen again. There is much more music to be discovered than we were taught to hear.

​

Giovanna Confalone, 2026