My name is Célia Oneto Bensaïd.
I am a French pianist.
I have been performing in concerts and touring, in France and abroad, for about ten years, with a very diverse repertoire.
Being a pianist allows me to be like a Swiss Army knife that can adapt to many different contexts.
I am a soloist in recitals or concertos, with orchestras on stage, but also on sound recordings.
I am a chamber musician.
I also make sound recordings for film soundtracks, and I also do transcriptions, turning orchestral scores into piano scores, and I have put a significant amount of work, over the last few years, in research, specifically on the rediscovery of the musical heritage of women, in other words the repertoires of female composers.
One composer I discovered at the Cité des Compositrices, which is a collective dedicated to the rediscovery of the musical heritage of women is Jeanne Leleu, a French composer of the twentieth century, who was the third woman to win the Grand Prix de Rome, which was was sort of like the Olympics of composition.
Jeanne Leleu is a name that is completely unknown to us.
And yet it turns out that Jeanne Leleu passed away less than 50 years ago.
When I realized that someone who lived so recently had already faded from memory...
It was quite a shock to see how quickly women composers are forgotten, and it makes you want to question why that is, since there is no reason for it to be this way.
So, Jeanne Leleu was a great adventure; Discovering her scores, and everything surrounding them, to help bring her work back to life.
When women composers have willed their collection to libraries, such as the BNF in Paris or the BNU in Strasbourg, it makes it easier for people who may be interested in their music or their life -- because obviously both aspects are interesting and have historical significance.
There are also composers who don't do this, and in these cases, of course, the process becomes much more complicated.
In terms of what is accessible in libraries, you have to bear in mind that, at the BNF, for example, between the time when a collection is submitted and the time when it becomes available, meaning when it has been cataloged, put online, and scanned, it can take several decades.
So, first, we need to be conscious of this.
And once this has happened -- if you don't know what's there, for example, Marie Jaëll, you're not going to be able to search on a library website for "Marie Jaëll".
So when you are looking for sheet music and you don't really know what you are looking for, it is better to search by type of musical ensemble, such as "piano quartet" -- violin, viola, cello, piano.
So there, we're going to find the scores that we all know such as Schumann quartets, Brahms quartets, and so on.
And we will also find names that we don't know.
At that point, you have to click, you have to dig deeper.
So in fact, it is by browsing through the library's collection of musical works by ensemble type that discoveries become possible.
Sometimes, you can find sheet music and letters - The letters allow us to reconstruct the person's social circle -- friends or family.
It gives us biographical clues that are incredibly valuable, and it's wonderful when there's more than just music to help us piece that together.
When you tell someone that their grandmother or great-grandmother, was a talented, perhaps even brilliant, composer, most people are stunned; they never knew that she possessed such a gift, as women composers often kept their talents hidden.
Or, if it is someone who perhaps didn't hide her talent and was acknowledged during her lifetime, they have by now been so completely forgotten that it really comes as a complete shock.
We're often speaking with people who have no connection to the music industry, who often don't even go to concerts and who are just discovering all this.
And so, often they are surprised and proud and sometimes it leads them to get involved, to take an interest.
And in fact it becomes a deeply human experience too.
And that's what is so inspiring in this work it's almost like archaeology, that tells a different story about families, and also about music itself.
What I would recommend to those who are interested in rediscovering forgotten repertoire especially from the past, is to go to the library, to keep your curiosity intact, despite the obstacles that will present themselves along the way.
And then, really decipher the works.
Don't be too easily satisfied and think, "I found a lost work, so that's good." You really have to go through a filtering process because you have to maintain high standards, especially for female composers, you mustn't do something because it's trendy, such as rediscovering women composers without any thought behind it.
No -- we have to rediscover women composers when they have composed compelling musical works that bring us something in terms of musical expression, and so on.
So, keep your standards high and stay passionate.
