Who We Are

Welcome to the Philomel Project! This one-woman show is run by Michigan-based violinist Emelyn Bashour (you can find out more about me at bashourviolin.com).

The Philomel Project was born in 2016 at the student living center information desk at the Eastman School of Music. One day, a friend and I discovered that despite being generally well-trained and at one of the top music schools in the country, we could barely name more than ten women composers without including our peers in the composition studio. Our music history curriculum had only briefly touched on Hildegard of Bingen, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Kaija Saariaho, which is considerably more than many music history classes include. I decided to program a piece by a woman on my junior recital, but that left me with a further dilemma: I needed something 5-10 minutes in length, for violin and piano, and preferably by a French composer. I was utterly lost. I scoured the internet with no resources at my disposal but Wikipedia’s list of female composers, which I had to individually narrow down to my specifications. It was exhausting and demoralizing to say the least, but the most prohibitive factor was the amount of time it took. I had already come to understand the uphill battle involved in simply finding a piece written by a women composer, especially when our professors often discourage deviating from the “standard repertoire,” and I wanted to make it easier. That semester, during my shifts at the dorm information desk, I started collecting data on what would eventually become Philomel.

Colin McCall Photography