Elles Women Composers
changes its name to
the Cité des Compositrices.
The Cité des Compositrices brings together all our activities,
from research to broadcasting, as well as La Boîte à Pépites
and the Festival Un Temps pour Elles.

When I founded the La Boîte à Pépites video channel in 2020, I had no idea that it would grow into the association that now runs a festival, a concert season and a record label.
After introducing you to more than 130 women composers on video, more than 600 works in concert, several hundred previously unreleased works on stage and online, we have also digitised nearly 4,000 scores, analysed the programming of more than 200 venues and deciphered nearly 2,000 works.
Our study Women composers: what place in French programming? published in spring 2024, reveals that women composers still account for only 6.4% of the works programmed in France in the 2022-2023 season, or around 4% of the programming time devoted to classical music. So there is still a huge amount of work to be done to do them justice.
For several years now, the name of our organisation, Elles Women Composers, has been the subject of a dispute with ELLE magazine, which is owned by the Lagardère group. The group had our website closed down a year ago. Because we do not want to face legal action, and because we want to move forward, we have decided to change the name of the association.
In 2025, Elles Women Composers will become the Cité des Compositrices. This change of name comes at a key moment in our structuring and the launch of new projects. This year will see the launch of our score publishing house, which will be accompanied by resource pages on our website.
This Cité des Compositrices will bring together all our activities, from research to distribution. An imaginary place, ‘for them’, these women composers who deserve to find their way back into concert halls.
Héloïse Luzzati
Founder and director
A WORD FROM THE PRESIDENT
A WORD FROM THE PRESIDENT
Five years! Rich in initiatives, discoveries and daring, which have already contributed so much to ‘doing justice’ to the women composers whom history has obliterated, forgotten or buried because they were women…
A new stage is about to begin as the association reviews and consolidates its governance, and renames itself the beautiful Cité des compositrices: a home for all of them, to rediscover, publish, record and perform – at last – their works.
I am very proud to be president of the association from now on! For me, it means accompanying and supporting her at every stage of her young life, in line with my deep conviction that the system of inequalities has wreaked devastation over the centuries, depriving us of the (re)discovery of outstanding talents throughout the cultural field.
Alongside Héloïse Luzzati and the formidable artistic collective she has brought together, and in conjunction with the institutions and structures working along the same lines, I shall devote myself to serving the exciting cause of equality in music.
Agnès Saal
President of the Cité des Compositrices

We take a 360° approach to countering today’s dramatic absence of women in concert music programmes. The organisation’s projects of production, mediation and diffusion are entirely built on the foundation stone of research, digging up forgotten manuscripts and studying scores.
It seems as if practically every day musicians are finding some undeservedly forgotten or ignored composition that has never been published, or recorded, or performed.
These discoveries are the starting point for all of our activities; our goal is to return them to the light and share them with the greatest possible number of people.

research

reading

concert

video

record label

publishing
NEWS
NEWS
RECORD RELEASE
RECORD RELEASE
The last two volumes of our Rita Strohl monograph have been the object of a torrent of awards: Diapason d’or of the year, Choc Classica of the year, and selections of the best records of the year according to Télérama, Le Monde and Le Figaro!
THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
THE ENCHANTED GARDEN
In partnership with the musée d’Orsay, the Philharmonie de Paris and France Musique.