I first became obsessed with French airs de cour as a student at the Juilliard School. My teacher gave me a collection for the flute, and I couldn’t get enough. I played them whenever I could, for this was music unlike any I had met - simple, elegant, with melodies you could sing on loop and harmonies that made your bones groove in the most graceful way. It was also music that I had never heard of before, and largely forgotten in classical music education.

Within the genre were love songs, comedy, and drama - the pop songs of the court of Louis XIV performed both in his bedroom and at his lavish gatherings. I became so enamored that I re-designed a selection of my favorite airs de cour as my 2017 project Amour Cruel, re-thinking them as if 21st century female singer-songwriters were the court composers for Louis XIV. Years later, I began to discover that there were women in the time of Louis XIV who were writing airs de cour, their work largely forgotten for the past few hundred years. Still only available in manuscript, these works had never been performed or recorded. Determined to change that, I began re-engraving and programming their works. As I delved deeper, I was blown away to find nearly 150 airs de cour written by women in the early 18th century - many, with vague attributions, their names reduced to initials or lost altogether. Who were these women? How had their works survived in the archives but remained unheard for centuries? The deeper I dug, the more I realized how much had been overlooked, and how excited I was to give this music new life.

My hope is that in the near future, these women’s music will be known by performers not only in the classical world, but beyond. There are indeed works of known female composers, alongside those by female composers whose names have been redacted, sometimes to just a few ****. While little is known about them, their music speaks to their wit, talent, and ability to connect people through music.